


The Agency

by Choi Eimi (Siyah_Kedi)



Series: Agencyverse [1]
Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Computers, M/M, Spy - Freeform, agency
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-20 00:57:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 44,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1490806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siyah_Kedi/pseuds/Choi%20Eimi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Special Agent Lay is a jack of all trades, relying on his AI computer "Luhan" to both give him missions for his agency and also bail him out of them when things go wrong.  When the villainous mastermind behind an internation organised crime ring, known only by the moniker Kris begins opposing Lay's missions, Luhan arranges a special team of analytical tacticians to accompany Lay, but the gun-toting, manic Chanyeol and his somber partner Tao end up getting Lay into just as much trouble as they help him out of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Meet Lay (And Luhan)

**Chapter One – Meet Lay (And Luhan)**

 

“Make a left here.”

Lay felt his way along the wall, wishing his night-vision glasses weren’t on the fritz.  “Are you sure?”  Although physically alone, the voice of his computerized ‘Artificial Intelligence’ Agency-contact emanated from the communication button pinned to the collar of his jacket.  At twenty five, Lay was no one’s idea of a special agent working for a government-funded Agency that operated in secrecy.  Especially not dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt.  They’d found through trial and error that suits weren’t exactly a functional uniform for field-work, and it was less likely to attract suspicion when people saw good-looking, fresh-faced young men and women dressed casually – it was easier to claim they were lost if discovered somewhere they shouldn’t be, for one. 

And sneakers afforded good traction on cement, well-waxed floors and carpets, and even, when necessary, roofs and outside walls.  Lay had never had to rappel down the outside of a building, but he’d heard stories from the Agency’s earliest years of agents who’d tried it in dress shoes and nearly fallen or become injured in a slip. 

“Of course I’m sure,” said his contact, unruffled.  Lay sighed.  “I’m looking at the schematics right now.  If you hadn’t broken your glasses…” the voice trailed off, insinuating that it had been  _Lay’s_  fault the night-vis glasses – capable of receiving visual transmissions displayed across the lenses as well – had been knocked off his face and broken in the last scuffle he’d been in. 

His careful edging along the wall revealed a doorway on the left, and Lay took it, banging his shin against something unseen in the dark.  He muffled a curse and neatly stepped around it.

“Alright Luhan, what next?”

“Uh, approximately thirty yards straight forward.  This is where the mainframe and other accessible units are held.  Information says the sensors have been disabled, so all you should need at this point is to get to the computer and get the information.  I’ll be on standby in case you need me.”

Having applied for the police at twenty years old, Lay made it through basic training in the Academy before he was yanked out of the program and offered a chance at something bigger.  It meant less heroics out on the street, but more opportunities to actually make a difference in the world and he’d jumped at it.   The Agency employed several ex-military types, and others who’d initially applied to the police, coast guard, fire department, and other public safety departments.  Three years of the most intense training regime Lay had ever even imagined had left him fully qualified in covert intelligence gathering, acrobatics and gymnastics, firearms and other forms of unarmed defense.  Most of his job involved things like the mission he was currently engaged in – sneaking into the headquarters of a supposedly corrupt corporation to steal – “Illegitimately borrow,” Luhan said wryly – information that could be used in court to get the right people sent to prison, and the company reformed.  Lay didn’t know all the details, but that wasn’t his problem. 

Nearly thirty feet yards exactly, he found another door, locked.  Wriggling a lock-picking kit out of his pocket, he wished again that the tech-boys could have fixed his old glasses or produced a new pair before he’d been ordered out on this job, but part of his training had included sensory deprivation and operating in total darkness.  It would take a little bit longer, that was all.  He’d only been a fully-qualified field agent for about a year and a half, and his only problem with the job was the Agency’s idea of ‘contacts’ – supercomputers programmed with distinct personality types to be the field agent’s unseen partner, and a link between the agent and the Agency itself.  Lay knew there were other agents, but not who they were or what they looked like.  He didn’t even know who – if anyone – was actually in charge of the Agency, and it was all a  _Just In Case_  scenario; if he were captured by a hostile party, there would literally be no information to torture out of him.  Lay was fully aware that at any time he might be killed, either by accident or on purpose, but it was considered a ‘known risk.’  He had, after all, aspired to be an officer of the law, and they faced more danger on a daily basis than Lay was ever likely to in his entire Agency career.

Still, it was a possibility.  To lessen the chances, his contact – known as Luhan, a wry, argumentative AI that Lay alternately despised and adored – was equipped through the combutton for audio/visual recording mechanisms, as well as a two-way radio that allowed it – him – to converse with Lay. 

Feeling his way in the dark, Lay picked the simple lock on the door and entered the main office.  He froze once inside, waiting to see if any alarms had been set off.  Luhan, ‘listening’ for a silent alarm, had nothing to add, and Lay assumed it was safe and entered.  Removing the pocket-hack – the brainchild of Sehun, the Agency’s Head of Technical Equipment – that would allow him to bypass the computer’s security, Lay withdrew a cord and found the input on the computer tower.  While the pocket-hack did its thing, Lay kept an ear out for signs of approaching security guards or the alarm system re-arming itself.  A beep from the machine told Lay it was done, and he turned the computer on.  The pocket-hack whirred while it logged in, and he withdrew a thumb-drive from another pocket of his jacket to plug in.  It automatically began downloading everything it could from the computer, but before it was done, a siren gave a whoop before falling silent. 

Red laser-lights illuminated the room – the sensors Luhan had just told Lay would  _not_  be operational!

“Luhan!” Lay whispered, watching the slow transfer of information from the computer to thumb-drive.  “What the hell?”

“What?” Luhan said, sounding annoyed.  Lay wanted to strangle whatever idiot had decided that computers needed personalities.  Supposedly, it was meant to make the agent feel less like he was in it alone, but it was often more trouble than it was worth.  Lay often wanted to meet the other agents employed by the Agency just to ask them if they too wanted to take their AI contact apart and burn the pieces.  “Uh-oh,” Luhan said, as Lay focused the combutton on the illuminated room. 

“Uh-oh?  That’s all you can say?   _Uh-oh?_   How am I supposed to get out of here?”

“How much time on the transfer?” Luhan asked, ignoring his question. 

With a mounting sense of urgency, Lay looked at the computer screen for five full seconds before he actually focused on it.  “Transfer at seventy-two percent,” he read off.  

“Sehun’s on his way,” Luhan said.  “Okay, don’t panic.”

“ _Don’t panic?_ ”

Luhan ignored that, too.  Jiggling his foot against the floor, Lay watched the progress bar creep up, wasting valuable seconds.  The minute he moved away from the computer terminal either way, the authorities would be contacted.  Although the Agency dealt amiably with the police, what Lay was doing was criminal breaking-and-entering, plus industrial espionage, plus theft.  Not even the Agency would be able to keep him out of jail if he got caught now. 

As soon as the machine flashed a  _Transfer Complete_  window at him, Lay removed the devices he’d brought and shut the computer back down. 

“Luhan, sometime today would be nice,” he said, voice tight. 

“Get down on the floor; you should have a few feet of clearance beneath the sensors.  Head southwest towards the left-hand corner, and get your toolkit out.  This is going to require a bit of finagling, but I think you’re competent enough to handle it.” 

Stowing his equipment, Lay stretched out on the floor.  From this vantage point he couldn’t see the sensors above him without twisting uncomfortably, and he pushed it to the back of his mind.

_Okay, it’s just like a training exercise.  You can do this._

Pep talk given, Lay wriggled forward on his stomach, inching towards the corner Luhan had indicated.  He found an air-duct grate, and sighed.  “You have got to be kidding me,” he said.

“Schematics indicate that the entire building is now armed,” Luhan said.  “It’s the only way out from here, unless you want to take your chances and run through the sensors.  I’m activating your personnel locator in order to guide you through the air system; you’ll hear a quiet beep in just a moment.”

Lay was grateful for the warning a moment later when the beep sounded and startled him.  At least he knew it was going to help him, and not the start of the alarm systems going off. 

“I see you,” Luhan said, completely unruffled.  Sometimes, Lay would have liked it if their personality chips included panic and tension – it usually wound him up tighter when Luhan was telling him things like ‘Stay calm’ in that flat, unemotional voice and the whole mission was seconds from falling apart at the seams.  “Are you through the grate yet?”

Gritting his teeth, Lay said, “I thought you said you could see me.  Aren’t you looking at the camera feed?”

“Negative,” Luhan replied.  “Camera recording only that ugly, cheap carpet you’re lying on.”

Lay, struggling with the screws holding the grate in place, almost didn’t answer.  “There’s your answer, genius,” he said.  “I’m still lying on the carpet, and therefore, no, I haven’t gotten past the screws yet.”

“Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty,” Luhan said.  Lay made an abortive gesture of frustration, and didn’t bother to reply.  Finally, the last screw came loose.  Lay carefully removed the grate, replaced the screws, and laid it in such a way that he should be able to replace it.

“I’m sending in a remote activated clean-up ‘bot,” Luhan said.  “Don’t bother with the grate, just get yourself into the duct system. It’s not meant to hold a fully-grown human, so you’re going to have to move quickly and quietly.”

“Easier said than done,” Lay muttered. 

“Didn’t copy, repeat transmission?”

“I didn’t say anything.”  He wriggled through the tiny hole, contorting himself in the effort.  The duct was slightly bigger, but still not a place he wanted to spend much time.  Behind him, he could hear the RC-bot scuttle across the room and pushed his feet to get his legs drawn inside.  Lights suddenly began to flash while a siren wailed through the P.A. system.

“It looks like you set off one of the sensors,” Luhan said flatly.  Lay pulled himself fully inside and listened to the ‘bot replace the grate before it zoomed away to wherever Luhan had sent it from.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Lay grunted, and with an effort, moved through the duct.  “Where the hell am I going now?”  The duct creaked and groaned under his weight.  “Luhan!”

“Uh, processing!  Okay, nineteen yards straight.  Ignore the offshoots until I tell you, then go right.”

Lay pulled and pushed himself through the square metal tube until Luhan indicated the correct turn.  It was dusty and clearly not meant for humans to go crawling around in it.  Through the other grates elsewhere in the building, Lay could hear the sounds of security guards and police massing for a search. 

“I’m charging my dry-cleaning bill to your account,” Lay said as he crawled through an inch of dirt and debris. 

“You don’t dry-clean tee-shirts,” Luhan argued.  “Take the next left turn, and then be careful.  It’ll be a vertical shaft, but it leads to the roof.”

Lay wormed his way around the turn and scooted into the shaft, bracing his feet against it and pushing his back against the far wall.  It wasn’t comfortable, but he wasn’t in any danger of falling in that position, and he was able to inch his way up.  “I’ll dry-clean this one,” he muttered, refusing to let Luhan get the last word in.  “Just so I can make you pay for it.”

“You don’t pay for your own dry-cleaning anyway.” 

Lay swore under his breath; Luhan had an answer for everything.  It seemed to take nearly a hundred hours, but then he was approaching the end; he could see the stars through the slats at the top, and hear the whirring of chopper blades. 

“Sehun should be there already,” Luhan said.  “He reported to me that he loosened the grate for you, so all you need to do is get safely out of the ventilation shaft, put it back, and get on the helicopter.  Sehun and I will take care of the rest.”

“Wonderful,” Lay said, panting with exertion.  He was sweating, and his palms were slick with it by the time he reached the top.  Knocking the grate clear, he pulled himself out just in time to see the roof-door open and expel two security officers.

“I told you I heard a helicopter up here!” one of them screamed.  Not bothering with the grate now that he’d been made, Lay bolted instead for the chopper.  Sehun was already lifting it off the gravel roof and Lay had to literally jump to get in before he took off entirely.  They left the two furious guards shaking their fists at them on the roof while Lay strapped himself in and made sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

“What a night, eh?”  Sehun said, as soon as Lay had fixed the helmet.  Exhausted, filthy, and wrung out, Lay could only nod at him. 

 

*

 

Safely back at his apartment, the USB-drive with the stolen information in Sehun’s hands and out of his hair, Lay stripped off his dirt-encrusted clothes before he even reached the privacy of his bedroom.  Every room in the Agency-funded apartment was monitored twenty-four/seven with both audio and visual equipment, though Lay had only found two of the cameras and three microphones.  Easier to discover were the speakers that allowed Luhan to speak to him directly.  The only room that wasn’t monitored visually was his bedroom and the attached bathroom.

There was absolutely nothing to suggest that anyone lived there, before Lay peeled his clothes off and left them in the hall.  Decorated in ultra-modern shades of black and white, with stainless steel and glass accents, the apartment looked more like a movie-set than someone’s house.  The exception to this, as in everything else, was the master bedroom.  Although a fastidious person in his work, Lay’s personal space was a cluttered disaster area with dirty clothes strewn about the floor, dirty dishes he’d neglected to bring to the kitchen for the maid – another Agency operative, though whether she did anything but cook and clean for him was a mystery – to wash, and some crinkled papers and assorted debris.  The bedroom contained not only a bed and dresser, but also a couch and television with a vast assortment of movies, including Lay’s guilty secret, animated Disney movies. 

After taking a superhot shower, Lay dressed in his comfortable cotton pyjamas and a clean teeshirt before raiding the fridge and bringing his conquest back to his bedroom.  He was only halfway there when Luhan’s voice emanated from the wall.

“Excuse me, Lay?”

He nearly threw something.  “What the fuck do you want now?  You can’t possibly expect me to go back out there again!”

Luhan was silent for a moment. “No, Lay, and I’m sorry if we gave you that impression.  All I wanted to do was apologise for the mess.  Our intelligence said the sensors were disabled.  It should have been an easy in, easy out.”

Mollified, Lay let himself into his room.  “Apology accepted,” he said, and sat down in front of The Little Mermaid with his sandwhich.


	2. Coffee By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

**Chapter Two – Coffee By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet**

 

A few days later, Lay was summoned to the Agency’s headquarters by a six-AM wake-up call from Luhan, who chirped brightly, “Wakey, wakey sleepyhead!”

Wishing that Luhan had a physical presence in his room that Lay could throw something at, he settled for yelling, “Fuck  _off!_ ” and burrowing back beneath his covers.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Luhan started, wheedling.

“The sun’s not even up, you mangled, sadistic shit-stain.”

Luhan laughed.  “You’re so cheerful in the mornings, Lay!  It’s part of why I love working with you so much.”

Pretending his heart hadn’t skipped a beat when Luhan said ‘love’ – because that was a psychiatric evaluation mark on his record that he  _really didn’t need_  – Lay pulled the pillow over his head.  “Seriously, Luhan, eat shit and die,” he muttered, knowing that the sensitive audio pickups in the room would catch it either way. 

Luhan was undeterred.  “Seriously Lay, we need you in here for a briefing.”

 _Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to be a computer,_  Lay thought.  It might be nice to seriously not mind when your buttons were pushed at ungodly hours of the morning. 

“I’ll sing,” Luhan threatened.  Lay knew from experience that Luhan had a very nice voice – the problem was his repertoire was limited to things like “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Without moving either the pillows or his body, Lay capitulated verbally.  “Fine!  Coffee!”

“You know that the Agency provides –”

“I will not drink that  _mud_  the Agency ‘provides,’” Lay said, finally angry enough to sit up.  “If I’ve got to get out of bed on my day off at  _six in the morning,_  I’m getting decent coffee before I come in and you’ll shut up about it or I’m not going in at all!” His voice rose with each syllable until he finished on a roar.

Luhan was silent.  Feeling victorious, Lay rolled out of bed – literally – and slid onto his hands and knees on the floor while he tried to gather enough  _oomph_  to complete the standing process.  Unfolding by degrees, he attained verticality.  Staggering into the bathroom, he showered quickly and dressed nicely, in slacks and a button-down, but left the top few buttons undone and didn’t bother with a tie at all. 

Since the Agency’s headquarters were only a few minutes swift walk from his apartment building – he was sure other agents lived in it as well, but he’d never seen them and wouldn’t know them even if he had – he didn’t bother with his car keys.  The elevator seemed to take an age to arrive, and then a further eternity to reach the ground floor.  Stifling his yawns behind his hand, Lay made a bee-line for the coffeeshop that did good business less than a block from his apartment. 

As a regular customer, the barista didn’t even have to ask him what he was ordering before she started preparing it for him, and Lay paid in exact change before stepping aside to wait for it to be handed over to him.  He’d just put his hands around the steaming cup of liquid heaven when someone jostled him from behind, causing the cup to slip right through his fingers. 

“Sorry, sorry!  I tripped!  Are you alright?”

The voice was a soothing balm to his wounded morning, and he stared mournfully at the spilled cup for a moment before he turned and found that the face was a match for the voice.  He might even have forgiven the guy based on looks alone. 

“I’m fine,” he said, and couldn’t help glancing back down at the sad remnants of his coffee. 

“I’ve never been so clumsy in my life, but I’m not usually a morning person,” the guy said.  “Let me buy you another one to make up for it.  I’m Byun Baekhyun, by the way.”

“Zhang Yixing,” Lay said, his real name a foreign sound on his lips.  “I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but you killed my coffee.  I’m not a morning person either,” he divulged.  “And I got woken up with a – phone call – about an  _urgent_  meeting in the office.”  He infused scathing sarcasm to the words, and was rewarded with a bright smile from Baekhyun. 

“Killed it,” Baekhyun echoed, the smile drooping slightly.  The pleasant barista had already fixed him up a replacement, and true to his words, Baekhyun wouldn’t allow Lay to pay for it.  “If it really meant that much to you, I’ll need to take you out sometime to really apologise,” Baekhyun said, handing Lay his coffee with a look that was half-flirtatious, half-apprehensive. 

It had been so long since he’d had any sort of  _normal_  human interaction – although the Agency encouraged its employees to maintain a normal lifestyle and hobbies outside of their work – that it took Lay a few blank seconds to realise that Baekhyun was asking him on a date.  Fearing rejection when his silence stretched, Baekhyun’s smile turned wistful.

“Maybe not…?”

“Yes!” Lay blurted.  “I mean, okay.”

Like a puppy, Baekhyun brightened.  “I have a busy schedule; do you have a phone?”

“Who doesn’t?” Lay asked, a rhetorical response to both Baekhyun’s statement and question, then set his coffee carefully on the counter to withdraw his mobile phone from his pocket.  Baekhyun recited the number, and Lay called it immediately.  When Baekhyun’s own pocket sang out with a merry jingle sung by a popular band, Lay grinned.  Baekhyun withdrew his handset and showed it off to prove that the number calling in was indeed Lay’s.  They paused for a moment to save the numbers, and then Lay collected his coffee and bagel.

“Call me sometime, or text,” Baekhyun said, snagging his own drink from the bar.  “I’m actually late, though, so I’ve got to go.”

“It was nice to meet you,” Lay said, and glanced at his phone to check the time.  He was technically late, too.  Baekhyun’s eyes drifted lazily from Lay’s face down to his shoes and back up again.

“Mm,” he said. “It was nice to meet you, too.”  His phone rang again, this time with a different ringtone, and he blanched before practically bolting from the shop.  Lay stood where he was for a long moment, just appreciating the fact that Baekhyun was interested.  Coffee well in hand, he continued on his way to the Agency’s front, supposedly an advertising company. 

As soon as he was in the front door, Luhan’s voice thundered out of his combutton. 

“What part of ‘get here  _as soon_ as _possible’_  meant for you to flirt with people in the coffeeshop?”  

Lay rolled his eyes.  “He made me drop my coffee,” he said, defensively.  “I told you I wasn’t coming in here without a decent drink.”

The receptionist at the front desk giggled and held up a convenience-store cup of her own coffee.  “I’m with you there, Agent Lay,” she said.  “The crap they serve here tastes like the water you wash the pot out with.”

“Three days later,” Lay added, saluting her with the cup and smiling when she waved him through the Agency’s entrance. 

“I’ve never heard anyone else complain about the coffee,” Luhan said, clearly in a tiff. 

“That’s because you don’t  _listen_  to anyone at all,” Lay sniffed.  “Now where’s the fire?”

Sehun jogged down the hall to meet him.  “Business room eight,” he said.  “Can I have like, a  _sip_  of your coffee?  For some reason the office pot is on the fritz.”

Lay reluctantly handed his cup to the techie, who inhaled it gratefully before taking a small sip, as promised.  “The office coffee tastes like brown dishwater anyway,” he said.

Sehun grinned.  “Not arguing, but I don’t usually have time to go out and get the good stuff.  Even dishwater is better than nothing, and nothing’s what I’ve had this morning.”

“Does  _everyone_  hate the coffee?” Luhan burst out with a crackle of irritated static.  Sehun and Lay exchanged a look.

“Yes,” they chorused. 

 

With Sehun on his heels, Lay made his way down to business room eight, where he found architectural schematics and several photographs of a peculiar-looking vase displayed on the wallscreen.  The voice of a man Lay knew only as “Ace” issued from a speaker set into the table.

“Thank you for getting up so early, Lay,” he said, a tinge of amusement in his tone.  Lay flushed, realising that as the boss, supervisor, and likely founder of the Agency, Ace would have heard the recording of his exchange with Luhan earlier.  “I appreciate your hard work and dedication.  You are one of my most successful agents, and this is why I’m personally giving this particular mission to you.  We’ve decoded the information you acquired the other day; in addition to proving some suspicions about that company in general, it also contained valuable intelligence about a smuggled vase that has been repainted to include national secrets. 

“The exchange of this vase is happening in a warehouse down by the pier, a handoff from criminal to criminal.  We need you to get in there, identify the passers, and acquire the vase before it leaves the country.”

Lay straightened.  “Understood, sir,” he said.

“Further information,” Ace continued.  “Nothing definite, but there have been rumours…”

He waited, but Ace didn’t continue immediately.  “Rumours of what, sir?”

“Certain, ah, undesirables are insinuating that Kris himself is involved in the handoff.”

The information was momentous enough to warrant the moment of silence that ensued.  The Agency had been chasing the criminal mastermind known only as “Kris” for nearly seven years.  Lay had heard rumours through Sehun and Luhan that the Agency had been  _formed_  to catch Kris, who was like smoke – detectable, but untouchable.  Even in the year and a half Lay had been on the Agency’s roster, they’d come close to Kris only twice, and each time he’d melted away as if he didn’t even exist. 

Ace continued.  “At the very least, if not Kris, then his right-hand man, ‘One’ will be there to oversee the pass, and maybe effect it himself.”

Lay heaved a sigh.  “This is big,” he said, and saluted, knowing that it was an archaic response.  “I will try to be worthy of your trust in me,” he said formally. 

“Good luck, agent,” Ace said simply, and with a click the speaker disconnected.  Lay’s combutton crackled.

“Ass-kisser,” Luhan muttered.

“Ass _hole,_ ” Lay muttered right back at him. 

Sehun cleared his throat.  Lay, having forgotten he was there, jumped.  “You’ll be armed for this one,” Sehun said.  “You have the federal authority to arrest them if possible, but no one will cry if you accidentally discharge your weapon into their faces, so long as you get them on camera before you do it.”

Lay snickered in spite of himself.  Authorised use of deadly force meant that this mission was a level-one priority, which should have been intimidating at the least.  Somehow, Luhan’s snarky, well-timed comment had broken the tension before it had a chance to build.  Lay paused to wonder if Luhan was programmed with psychiatric training, to anticipate things like that before they happened, or if it was just an aspect of his personality chip. 

“Understood,” was all he said.  The combutton was made mostly of plastic and silicon, not containing enough metal to set off a detector.  It also precipitated the need to wear a wire, as it functioned in the same way without being as noticeable.  Disguised as it was – this one looked like a decorative pin – most people would take it for jewelry and never know that it was in fact a two-way radio with hidden camera, recording everything.  Lay returned to his apartment long enough to change into his usual uniform of jeans, rubber-soled sneakers for traction, and a black tee-shirt with a plain, unadorned black jacket.  He pinned the combutton to the jacket, looked himself over, and returned to the Agency to file the release forms on the weapon.  He was licensed to carry handguns under a certain caliber, trained in their use, and even possessed a concealed weapons license, but in his usual work it wasn’t necessary, and even as an agent – unless specifically authorised, as he was now – if he shot someone in the line of duty it would be murder and he would be arrested.  This was a special case, another unspoken sign of  _just_  how important this vase was. 

Sehun also handed him the keys to a nondescript sedan, equipped – as all Agency vehicles were – with the connections to his contact, and a tracer, in the event that he lost either his combutton or the vehicle itself. 

Multiple voices rang out, all the AIs and even Ace himself.  “Good luck, agent.”

Lay saluted the camera and entered his borrowed car, the GPS navigation system displaying directions to the warehouse.  If necessary – such as in the event that he were incapacitated – Luhan was capable of engaging a sort of autopilot for the car and driving it himself via the onboard computer, but whenever he could, Lay preferred to manually control it. 

“Are you nervous?” Luhan asked, after a few minutes of driving in silence.  Lay flicked on the radio and turned the volume down, wanting it more for background noise than anything else.

“Not really,” he replied.  “It’s one of the more exciting prospects about this job.  I feel like James Bond right now.”

Luhan snickered.  “Just don’t get cocky.”

“That’s why you’re my partner, Luhan,” Lay said archly. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lay refused to answer, leaving Luhan whinging at him, “Laaay, what does that meeaan?”

*

He arrived at the abandoned warehouse where the exchange was to take place, and parked the car in an inconspicuous place around the back.  If things fell apart, Luhan would be able to bring the car around by remote operation, but that was a worst case scenario and Lay didn’t want to alert anyone to his presence there in the warehouse.

Getting in was no problem – some villainous foresight had led the criminals to unlock the front door, for ease of entrance.  Once inside, Lay found himself with the dubious displeasure of needing to figure out where the exchange would take place and concealing himself appropriately. 

The warehouse was suffused with a rank, musty smell, overlaid with the tang of saltwater from the nearby Yellow Sea.  Lay wrinkled his nose and made a disgusted sound.

“What is it?” Luhan asked.

“Just be grateful you can’t  _smell_  this,” Lay said.  “It stinks like someone died in here.”

“Rats, maybe?”

“Or maybe this is where they hide the bodies,” Lay said, not entirely joking.  There were formless shapes covered by sheets, and everything was overlaid with an inch of dust.  “Their housekeepers need to be fired,” Lay muttered.  He glanced down at his feet to make sure he wasn’t leaving trails, and realised the floor had been swept clean, probably to prevent others from leaving footprints.  It worked in his favour, though, and he was grateful for the small favour.  Then, remembering his youth full of movies with dead characters, he made sure he looked up as well, scanning the catwalks and ceiling supports for any signs of life. 

Luhan must have caught some of the movement in the camera, for he asked quietly, “What are you doing?”

Feeling embarrassed and not knowing exactly why, Lay said the first thing that popped into his mind.  “Looking for ninjas.”

“Ninjas.”

“It always used to happen in movies,” Lay said, defensively.  “The heroes are trying to avoid detection, and death falls on them from above.”

“In the form of ninjas.”

“Just let it go.”

“Go, like a ninja!” Luhan said, laughing.  Lay sighed, realising he was going to pay for that comment for a long time. 

After a brief silence, Lay cleared his throat.  “I’m just saying, no one in movies ever looks up.”

“For the hidden ninjas,” Luhan said. 

Lay grit his teeth.  “I am going to find and dismantle you if you don’t shut up.”

“Shutting,” Luhan said, but it lasted only a moment.  “It occurs to me that the most likely place will be this circle they’ve cleared away here in the middle,” he offered.  Lay, who by this point had walked the whole of the warehouse and found the majority the space cluttered and dusty, pinched his nose against a sneeze.  When he felt sufficiently recovered, he nodded even though Luhan couldn’t see him.

“I agree,” he said, and wriggled his nose, trying to dispel the uncomfortable feeling he’d given himself warding off the sneeze.  There were some times he was grateful he worked mostly alone.  “I think here,” he said, and ducked between two towering, sheet-covered objects.  “I can see out, but it’s highly unlikely, from the angle, that they’ll be able to see me.”

“I concur,” Luhan said.  “Now the fun part.”

Lay checked his watch.  “Intel says we have less than twenty minutes until the appointed showtime.” 

“And you always wait so patiently and quiet,” Luhan said.  Lay refused to answer.  Stakeouts were, in fact,  _not_  his favourite way to spend any amount of time, but from his vantage point he was able to watch the door as well, and knew from his check of the rest of the floor that there were no other ways in or out, unless the criminals he was here to stop rappelled in from the roof. 

Five minutes before the scheduled pass, proving that some criminals were, if nothing else, punctual, the door opened and spilled the light of the setting sun into the warehouse.  Lay blinked against it, and watched three figures enter.  As soon as the door closed again, he was light-blind, and closed his eyes to focus on the afterimages to dispel them.

The voices echoed.  “I can’t see a damn thing in here,” one man said.  “Sure we can’t use flashlights?”

“Sure, Chen,” said another.  Lay’s breath caught – at least one of Kris’s known associates, his lead drug-runner and infamous poisoner Chen… “If you want to announce to everyone that we’re here.”

“Don’t be an ass, Xiumin,” Chen snapped.  “It’s fucking cold in here, too.”

“Boys, boys,” the third voice was rich and sultry.  “No need to fight.  And Chen, watch your language.”

“Yeah, Chen, watch your fucking language,” Xiumin muttered.  His voice carried, and the third speaker turned quickly and delivered a solid blow to the gut that doubled Xiumin over.  It was the last thing Lay could see clearly, because the unlikely trio was approaching the cleared circle in the near-center of the warehouse, and if  _Lay_  could see them,  _they_  would be able to see him. 

He listened to their footsteps and the sounds of their voices, but the echoes off the empty stone walls and concrete floor were disrupting his sense of where they were.  Very slowly, he reached under his jacket and thumbed the catch of his holster open, palming the grip of his Agency-issued nine-millimeter. 

Crouched low to the ground, Lay leaned around the cover of whatever he’d taken shelter behind.  In the dim light streaming through the windows far above, near the ceiling, he could just barely make out the shadowed forms of two of Kris’s notorious circle.  He withdrew the gun ever-so-slightly, but didn’t want to take aim before all the players were assembled.  He reminded himself that Chen alone had killed over three hundred people – mostly underworld dogs like himself, but murder was murder – and that he would be saving  _thousands_  of lives with their deaths.

Still, it was the first time he’d ever been called on with the possibility of actually having to shoot another human being.  It sat uneasily with him, and his stomach roiled. 

“They’re late,” Xiumin complained. 

“Amateurs,” Chen snorted.  “You can’t expect retards like that to remember to look at their watches.”

Even as he spoke, the warehouse door swung open again and more people filed in.  They made their way to the center, and Lay shifted his jacket so that the combutton could record and transmit the video evidence back to headquarters.  Unfortunately, the movement also shifted the sheet – just slightly – and dust plumed in the air.  It was dark enough that the dust remained invisible, but that didn’t stop it from going straight up Lay’s nose.  It twitched and itched, and Lay had to let go of his gun to pinch it closed again to ward off a sneeze. 

The newcomers spoke.  “Do you have the money?”

Xiumin, a slippery, known money-launderer whom the best of law enforcement hadn’t been able to pin enough evidence on to bring to justice, displayed something that looked like a briefcase.  He flipped it open, and even in the dim light offered by the newcomer’s flashlights, Lay could see that there were stacks and stacks of high-denominational bills inside.  Whether any of it was real and legal, he couldn’t tell, not from that distance.  It seemed to appease the traders, however, who heaved up a briefcase of their own.  Letting it fall open, they displayed the ugly blue-and-white patterned vase, supposedly encrypted with national secrets.

The exchange was made.  Lay rose silently to his feet, reached into his jacket for his gun, and then all of a sudden found himself embraced from behind.

 _The third man!_  He remembered too late, adrenaline spiking into panic as one hand pinned his arms to his side while the other pressed a damp cloth over his mouth and nose.  Lay struggled, but the grip was immoveable and he could only hold his breath so long.  Inhaling the sickly-sweet scented chemical, the already-dim warehouse faded to black.  He retained just enough awareness of his surroundings to feel himself lowered gently and silently to the ground, and then his mind shut down entirely.


	3. Dating, and Other Hazardous Pastimes

**Chapter Three – Dating, and Other Hazardous Pastimes**

 

Lay awoke to moonlight streaming in through the windows.  Luhan was yelling about something, but his mind was fuzzy.  Briefly, Lay wondered if he’d somehow fallen asleep in the kitchen because he was lying on something cold, hard and uncomfortable, certainly not his heated waterbed at home. 

Then he realised that something was off about both the light and the tone of Luhan’s voice, and came fully awake.  He looked around and saw the sheet-covered remnants of whatever the warehouse had housed before becoming abandoned; memory kicked him in the head, bringing a vicious headache right along with it. 

“Lay!  Agent Lay!” Luhan sounded  _panicked,_  which shouldn’t have been possible.  “Respond!  You have five minutes to report on your condition or we’re sending someone after you!”

“’M’fine,” Lay mumbled.  “Luhan, shut up.  My head hurts.”

“Oh thank god.”  Luhan’s voice was mercifully silenced for a long moment while Lay got his bearings.  “You’ve been unconscious for approximately two and a half hours,” Luhan said.  “From what I could hear, none of the other men were even aware of your presence.  What do you remember?”

Lay struggled to a sitting position, and looked around the darkened warehouse.  The hand-off had been made, he remembered.  Xiumin had offered a lot of money for the vase, right before someone snuck up behind and gassed him.  Oddly, though, he’d just put Lay on the ground and then apparently left him there without telling any of the others.  Possibly, they’d thought he was some kind of homeless person or a teen breaking in for a lark.  Once again, Lay was grateful that the Agency didn’t require him to wear any sort of formal uniform.  If he’d been made as a federal agent, they might have shot him, or worse. 

“You got the video?”

Luhan’s voice was tight.  “We got it.  All criminals with records, all wanted but lacking evidence to convict.  Xiumin and Chen are known confederates of Kris, the third man suspected to be ‘One.’  We managed to catch a glimpse of his ring, the starburst One never takes off.  From audio files recorded while you were down, the pass went smoothly.  The car remains undetected and is still where you left it.”

Lay felt cold all over.  With only a few photographs and rumours to go by, Kris’s right-hand man – known only as ‘One’ – was terrifying.  A remorseless killer, a sociopath of the highest degree, he was the only person all agents wanted more than Kris himself.  If Lay had come that close to him and not even known it… He was lucky to be alive.

“Shit,” he muttered.  “Dammit!” Slamming his fist down on the ground, he made his headache worse.  “I fucking lost it.  I didn’t even see him move away from the others.”

His combutton crackled with static.  “No,” Luhan said when it cleared.  “Ace agrees with my assessment.  There’s nothing more you could have done, and to have attempted it might have cost your life.  We don’t have so many agents that we’re willing to let you throw your life away on something like this.  At least Kris wasn’t there.”

“Bring the car,” was the only thing Lay said.  With his head threatening to split open, he didn’t think he could handle driving, or even walking the length of the warehouse to collect it himself.  He was furious with himself for letting them get away.  All three of them were within range. 

On the other hand, if he’d shot them all the minute they entered the warehouse, the people who had the vase would have seen the bodies and fled, ultimately selling it to someone else.  Back on the first hand, if he’d shot them, the world would be rid of three utterly unsavoury people, and damn the other consequences.

Instead, he’d let himself take his eyes off them, and One had snuck right up behind him and without even trying to overpower him – he’d struck that smoothly and silently – put him down.  From the taste in his mouth and the memory of that smell, he thought it might have been chloroform.  In the course of his training, Lay had been made immune to many things: inoculated against all viruses that had vaccines, fed tiny doses of arsenic to build up his defenses against it.  He’d been given popular drugs and taught to work through their effects, but there was nothing that he could have done against chloroform, or the more common date-rape drugs like rohypnol.  It was just his bad luck that had caused the mission to fail so spectacularly. 

He still felt a distinct sense of failure, and hated himself for it. 

“The car is waiting,” Luhan said quietly.  “Can you make it outside, or should I send help?”

“My head hurts,” Lay barked.  “I’m not crippled.”  Fear warred with the other emotions roiling through him.  Although the episode was over, the danger passed, he was acutely aware that anything else could have happened.  One might have shot him, or stabbed him.  He might have abducted him while he was out cold.  God only knew why he’d simply contented himself with putting Lay down and out – he hadn’t even taken the gun still hidden beneath Lay’s jacket.  “Sorry,” Lay said suddenly, exhaling heavily.  “I don’t mean to snap at you.  I know it’s not  _your_  fault.”

“Now you stop that  _right now,_ ” Luhan said firmly.  “It’s not your fault either.  As I’ve already said, Ace has already reviewed the footage and agreed with me that there’s nothing more you could have done.  You did everything exactly right.  There was no way any of us could anticipate that One would  _actually_  be there, or that he’d find you.”

Lay stood up and refused to answer.  Slowly, pain throbbing with all the subtlety of a mallet-strike behind his eyes with every step, he made his way back out of the warehouse.  The car was waiting as promised, and Lay crawled into the backseat.  “Drive, Luhan,” he said.  The car was already shifting into gear.  It was late enough that with luck, no one would notice that the car was driving itself. 

 

Arriving back at the Agency, Lay battled his nausea and the leftover dizziness from the chemically-induced unconsciousness and practically crawled out of the car.  Sehun was waiting to assist him, holding out a glass of water and two paracetamol. 

“Thank you,  _God,_ ” Lay murmured, and swallowed the pills dry before practically pouring the water down his throat. 

“Just ‘Sehun’ will do,” Sehun quipped.  “Luhan mentioned you had a headache.  Any other side-effects?  Do you need to see medical?”

Even the nausea was fading now that he’d put something besides acid in his stomach.  Lay shook his head, which set off a fresh wave of pain in his temples.  “Just a mother of a headache.”

“You’ll need to see Ace for debriefing.  They saw the tape Luhan sent, but you know.  Formalities.” Sehun shrugged, and offered an arm for Lay to lean against.  Lay debated not taking it, and then decided he’d rather suffer the indignity of needing a leaning-post than the added embarrassment of falling flat on his face. 

Ace buzzed them into the meeting room immediately.  He was displayed on a video screen as a silhouetted figure, but Lay was used to this.  “Thank you, Agent Lay, for putting yourself into significant personal danger in order to carry out this mission.  Were you harmed?”

“Nothing that’ll leave any marks,” Lay said, dropping tiredly into a chair and for once not bothering with the formalities. 

Ace let it pass without comment.  “You may not have achieved the hoped-for victory –” Lay flinched “– but something good did indeed come of the night’s endeavors.  We were able to capture Xiumin and Chen on video consorting with other known criminals, engaging in illegal trade, and a number of other things we can put them away for a good long while on once we catch them.  Other agents are even now mobilizing to effect this capture, and possibly retake the vase before it falls into Kris’s hands.

“If you would like, I can release the video footage to you now.”

“Please,” Lay said. He didn’t often get a chance to see what things looked like from combutton-view and he wanted to know what had been said when he went down.  The silhouette vanished from the wallscreen; in its place, Lay could see the warehouse.  He could hear himself bantering with Luhan, and flushed; he forgot that ‘monitored at all times’ really meant  _all times._  He was so accustomed to it that he didn’t even think about it anymore. 

His walk of the warehouse, seen in shades of green and white through the night-vision infrared camera, was unremarkable.  He rarely realised just how much that little camera saw and recorded, and glanced down at his chest to look at it.  Disguised, the combutton resembled a flower-shaped pin; not the most masculine of covers, but he’d already perfect the story of ‘it belonged to my dead grandmother.’

When he saw himself hiding between the two towering whatever-they-were, Lay’s attention sharpened.  He’d barely been able to see the three criminals, his night-vision glasses still in the repair shop, and he wanted to get a good look at them now. 

They entered, Chen first, then Xiumin, then the mysterious ‘One.’  Dressed in suits and ties, they looked like respectable businessmen except for the coldness in their eyes, and of course, the fact that they were walking into an abandoned warehouse at one in the morning with a briefcase full of money.  Even at the distance they’d been, either the acoustics of the warehouse or the combutton’s sensitive mic picked up their words clearly, even Xiumin’s muttered comment and subsequent grunt of pain when One sucker-punched him.  

Lay saw immediately what his problem had been; while he was fighting not to give himself away with a sneeze, One detached himself from the trio and ducked through the debris left behind in the warehouse.  He was unable to see him, unaware that One had even left the other two when the second group of people tromped in.  They displayed the goods to one another, and Lay straightened in his seat.

The camera-view jostled slightly when One’s arm came around his middle and moved his jacket, and the other hand was invisible until a few seconds had passed and Lay doubled over, unconscious.  When Lay bent, his face and One’s hand came into view of the camera, clearly displaying the silver starburst ring that was One’s signature sign.  To his surprise, once he was unconscious, One merely lowered him to the ground – gently, almost delicately – and stepped over him, apparently pocketing the chemical-soaked handkerchief.  While the camera was getting a good shot of the dirt on the floor, there was nothing interfering with the mic, and it continued to pick up their conversation.

“Where did you go?”

“Just making sure there were no witnesses,” One said smoothly.

“Find anything?”

“Just a rat,” One said.  “Nothing serious.”

“Eeugh, rodents,” Chen said, audibly shuddering.  “Well, we’re all agreed then, gentlemen?”

“Not a word,” one of the strangers said in reply.  “The vase is yours, the money is ours, and none of us was ever here.”

There was some scuffling noises as the exchange was made. 

“Have a good night, boys!” One called, sing-song.  Footsteps faded away, and then the door opened and closed.  In a much different voice, One said, “Xiumin, get D.O. on the phone, tell him we’ll pay double his usual if he’ll get the vase back before he does for them.  Chen, is it the real vase?  Kris won’t stand for counterfeits.”

Lay’s pulse raced.  One had lied to his comrades about what he’d found, which meant Lay’s presumption was right.  One hadn’t bothered with him, never suspecting he was an agent and recording.  He’d mistaken Lay for someone unimportant, not even worth picking his pockets.  There was also the fact that he’d admitted knowledge of the terrifying assassin, D.O., and suggested personal intimacy with Kris himself. 

“This,” he began, excited.  Luhan cut him off.

“I know!  I told you the mission wasn’t a complete failure.”

Chen spoke, apparently examining the vase.  “There are definitely words in there, and microchips embedded in the glaze.  I doubt they’d have gone through that much trouble to forge it.”

The smile was audible in One’s voice.  “ _Good_.  Now let’s get out of this infested rat-hole and go home.” 

The sounds of more footsteps, the door swinging wide and slamming shut, and then silence.  The video froze. 

“Our task now will be cleaning up whatever mess is made,” Ace said through the speakers.  “Lay, you did good.  Go home now and get some rest; take the car, and let Luhan drive, you still look fairly terrible.”

“Thank you,” Lay mustered, feeling drained and gross.  He wanted to spend an hour in the shower after lying on that disgusting floor, and he felt like he could still taste traces of the chloroform on his lips.  It was doubtful, of course, but he  _felt_  like it was there. 

“I’ll get the car,” Luhan said simply.  Sometimes it was  _nice_  to have a computer taking care of you, Lay decided.  They didn’t hog the blankets or steal the remote control, and they literally never forgot anything from birthdays to where the keys were.  And it wasn’t always necessary to talk.  Luhan was capable of chattering to fill the silences, but when Lay needed him to be quiet, there was neither a whisper nor a snore to be heard. 

Making his way back out of the office after reassuring Ace that he had nothing to add to the night’s events, Lay gratefully found the car waiting at the door, as promised, and collapsed into the driver’s seat just to maintain appearances.  It still felt a little strange when the wheel turned under his hands without his direction – in ordinary circumstances, the wheel moving on its own meant the car was out of control – but he’d been dealing with it for over a year now and it wasn’t unmanageable. 

Luhan had to wake him up again when they reached the front door of his apartment complex, but once he was up and moving he managed to get upstairs into his own house without further prompting.  As he’d promised himself, the first thing he did – after stripping and leaving his clothes in a trail leading to the bathroom again – was shower. 

“I returned the car and your weapon to headquarters,” Luhan informed him.  “And you should stop leaving your clothes everywhere; you’ll scandalise the maid.”

Half-dead on his feet, more from tension than exertion, Lay braced his forearms against the wall of the shower and let the water pour over him.  “It’s the same girl since I started, isn’t it?” Luhan would be in a position to check the employment files, and since Lay had only actually put his own eyes on the girl twice, he had no way of knowing who cleaned his apartment, cooked his meals, or did his washing.  It might, for all he knew, be Kris himself.

Snickering under his breath, he waited for Luhan to come back.

“Yes,” Luhan said slowly.  “Same girl.  But I don’t understand…”

Lay turned the water off and shivered in the sudden absence of heat.  “It means she’s been in this with me from the beginning, and if nothing I’ve done has shocked or scandalised her before now, she needs a psych-eval.  Leaving my clothes on the floor is hardly a new habit.”

Luhan made clucking noises.  It sounded remarkably lifelike, and Lay briefly wondered if he was utilizing a recorded sound.  “It’s a bad habit,” Luhan scolded.  “She’s your housekeeper, not your servant.”

Lay reached for a towel and rubbed himself dry before stepping out of the shower stall.  He briskly dried his hair, watched it fall back into his face, and rehung the towel before making a bee-line for his bed.  He usually made an attempt at modesty in the form of at least pyjama pants, in case the maid – whose name he still didn’t know – came into his bedroom at night when he’d accidentally kicked off the blankets, but he was too tired to go digging for them.  She’d have to settle for getting an eyeful if she appeared.

Luhan, of course, noticed the absence of usual nightly noises such as drawers opening and closing.  “Not getting dressed?”

“It’s three in the morning,” Lay told his pillow.  “I’ve been up since six this morning, since some inconsiderate jackass decided to bellow in my ear.  In case you never realised, being awake for twenty-one hours straight after only four hours of sleep the night before is not my idea of fun.  If you can cart your ass down here and find my clean pyjamas, I’ll put them on, but I’m not leaving this bed for at least another twelve hours.” 

 

Sometime after noon, the ringing of his mobile phone roused Lay enough for him to silence it and look at the time.  Deciding that nine hours was still three short of his goal, he flopped over, pulled the blankets back over himself, and went back to sleep. 

The next time his phone woke him was nearly four, and this time it was beeping to let him know he had a voicemail message.  His bladder added to the general sense of urgency he felt about getting up, and he found a basket of clean clothes, all neatly folded or already strung on hangers and awaiting a return to their home in his closet.  Apparently the maid  _had_  snuck in during the night. 

After relieving himself and brushing the foul taste out of his mouth, Lay straightened his hair and went to get dressed.  There wasn’t anything planned – he usually had a few days off between missions, if not longer.  There just wasn’t a need for him to constantly be out in the field.  Usually, he spent his spare time reading, watching movies, or going over cold cases that modern technology might offer new insights into.  But it made him feel less like a bum for sleeping until the late afternoon if he managed to get dressed at some point during the day.  Unfortunately, his job had turned him into a somewhat reclusive night-owl, which reminded him of the voicemail waiting on his phone. 

“Luhan,” he said.  Immediately, Luhan’s voice crackled over the speakers.

“Good morning to you, too, Prince Valiant.  Did you sleep well?”

Lay took stock of himself.  His headache was gone, the lingering nausea from the drugs was gone, and he was feeling well-rested and antsy.  “Sure,” he said.  “Like the dead.  By the way, do you have a record of how long the maid was in my room?”

Luhan snickered.  “Afraid she’s been peeping?”

“Just slightly.”

“Well, you  _will_  go to bed naked,” Luhan said.  Lay quashed the awkward feeling in his stomach ruthlessly.  After a brief pause, Luhan was back on the com.  “Records show she went in with a basket of your clothes at nine AM this morning, apparently set it down, and left that pit you call a bedroom immediately.  Truthfully, I don’t blame her.  How can you stand to live like that?”

Lay was guarded.  “How do you know what my room looks like?”

“In the first place, the maid does talk.  In the second, the camera in the main hall is angled in such a way that when your door is open, I can see directly to the far end of your room where the window is.  It’s enough to prove to me that I’m glad I don’t have to live there with you.”

“There’s a reason we have maids,” Lay said blithely, reassured but not content.  The restless energy coursing through him was making him fidgety.  “I have a highly stressful, dangerous job.  I can’t be expected to keep my living space neat when I’m in it all the time.”

“That’s another thing,” Luhan said, with the air of someone about to go off on a royal tangent.  “Why  _are_  you in it all the time?”

Feeling stark and suddenly bare, Lay stepped into the hall where Luhan could see him and stared into the camera he knew was there.  “Where else would I go?” he asked.  He’d given up his Academy friends when the Agency had co-opted him from the police force.  He’d given up his school friends when he decided to go into law enforcement.  His knowledge of the Agency extended only to the fact that it was more than what he saw, but he didn’t know who the other agents were.  He didn’t even know his own maid’s name.  His schedule didn’t leave much time or inclination to go out clubbing, and besides, what could he say when asked what he did for a living?  Secret agent? 

“Oh, Lay,” Luhan said, and there was – or seemed to be – genuine compassion in his voice.  “Go to the park.  Go to the movies.  Go get a drink and pick up some cute young thing.”

“And tell them what?  I’m unemployed?  A professional layabout?   A spy?”

“Government agency, classified.  It’s intriguing, at least.  You’d get sex out of it if nothing else.”  

Lay felt his expression twist.  He knew Luhan didn’t mean it like it sounded, but it made him angry nonetheless.  “If all I wanted was  _sex_  I could go out right now and pick up.  I could pay someone to sleep with me if that was all I wanted.”  He pulled his arms around his chest and hugged himself.  “I want  _companionship,_ ” he said.  “I want someone to cuddle with on the couch and watch stupid movies with me.  Someone to lay next to me when I sleep, and hold me if I have nightmares.”  He realised he was getting into territories covered by the word  _lame_  and remembered that all conversations were recorded and could be monitored at any time.  He shut up.  Luhan was silent. 

It might have stayed that way for the rest of the night if his phone didn’t beep and remind him that he had a voicemail.  Startled, Lay hurried to go and check it. 

“ _Hey sleepyhead – I hope you’re sleeping and not deliberately ignoring my call – it’s Baekhyun.  Remember me?  I wanted to ask if you’d like to go out tonight.”_

Staring at his phone like it was the answer to the mysteries of the universe, Lay took advantage of the fact that there were no cameras in his room and spun around like an idiot, clutching his phone and grinning widely before collapsing backwards onto his bed.  “Luhan, I think my problems might be solved.”

“Oh?”

“Mm.  Remember that guy I told you about in the coffee-shop?”

Luhan was silent for so long that Lay wondered if he’d been taken offline for a moment.  “Yeesss,” he said finally, dragging the word out.

“Well, he just called and asked me out.  Hah!  I have a date tonight.”  He popped up off the bed like a manic jack-in-the-box and struggled to find something clean to wear that wasn’t ragged jeans and band shirts. 

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Luhan said cautiously. 

“Psh.  Weren’t you  _just_  telling me to go out and get a date or go to the movies?”  Lay found a nice shirt with pinstripes and threw it onto his bed before moving on to the hunt for trousers.  “Why does everything I own  _suck?_ ” he asked, mostly rhetorically.  He did his own shopping; it shouldn’t be this hard. 

“Well, yeah, but not with him.” 

Lay froze, and then straightened.  “What’s wrong with him?”  Luhan had access to nearly everything.  Background checks, credit reports, financial and employment history, school records.  If he’d seen something in Baekhyun’s that raised a flag, Lay needed to know  _now._

“Nothing.  I just don’t like him.”

Relaxing, Lay breathed a sigh of relief.  “You don’t like anyone,” he said, and uncovered a pair of new, dark-wash jeans he’d never worn at the bottom of his drawers.  “Aha!”  Triumphantly clutching the jeans, he picked up his phone and found Baekhyun’s number.

Baekhyun’s slow, creamy voice answered after just one ring.  “Hello?”

“Ah, hi.  Baekhyun?”  Cursing himself for an idiot, Lay sat on his bed and held the phone in one hand while he struggled into the stiff-legged jeans with the other.  “It’s Yixing.  You called earlier?”

Even over the phone, Lay could hear his smile.  “Oh, hi!  So you weren’t ignoring me?”

“Absolutely  _not,_ ” Lay said.  “Just sleeping.  I work nights unless they call me in early.”

“For meetings?” Baekhyun asked, snickering.  “I’m  _very_  sorry about the coffee.  I saw a few movies I’d like to see, and wanted to know if you would do me the honour of accompanying me to one of them tonight?”

“For meetings,” Lay agreed, and privately wondered,  _Who says things like ‘do me the honour’ anymore?_   Unlike Luhan, it didn’t set off any warning bells in his head.  It sounded cheesily romantic, and Lay found himself warming to Baekhyun in spite of Luhan’s reservations.  What did a computer – even an advanced, artificially-intelligent supercomputer – know about things like dating and emotions?  “And I would  _love_  to see a movie with you tonight.  I don’t even care what it is,” he added, and then cursed himself for a fool. 

Baekhyun chuckled warmly.  “That’s good to know,” he said.  “Do you want to get something to eat before or after?”

“Dinner, too?  You know how to treat a guy right,” Lay joked.  Baekhyun laughed again.  It set off flutters of warmth in Lay’s chest – a good sign, he thought.

“Dinner too.”

“Before,” Lay said.  “I haven’t eaten yet today, and I don’t think I’ll make it through a whole movie.”

“Mm,” Baekhyun said.  The noise sent shivers up and down Lay’s spine in a  _very_ good way.  It reminded him of the look Baekhyun had given him in the coffee-shop, too – as though Baekhyun were trying to guage whether or not he might taste good.  “I’ll keep that in mind.  Meet you in front of the coffee-shop?  Or do you prefer to drive?”

Lay’s well-honed sense of self-preservation kicked in.  “On a first date, I definitely drive myself,” he said.  A small voice in the back of his mind that sounded remarkably like Luhan chimed in with,  _And the second, and the third…_   He squashed it, and stood to pull his jeans up the rest of the way over his hips. 

“Just in case,” Baekhyun said, musingly.  “Well, I’m not offended.  Do you know Luccesca’s?” 

It was a high-class Italian restaurant in a nearby district.  Lay often thought of going there, but was depressed at the thought of going alone.  “It’s like you read my mind,” he said.  “Six?”

“Six it is,” Baekhyun agreed.  “I’ll find you.  Goodbye,” he added.  His voice lingered over the word.  Lay clicked his phone off, and tossed it aside to fasten his jeans before pulling on the shirt he’d laid out, then hurried into the bathroom to apply a touch of cologne, brush his teeth, and generally make sure he was put together well enough for Luccesca’s and then a movie. 

“What do you think, Luhan, hair gel or no hair gel?”

“Come into the hallway where I can get a look at you,” Luhan said.  Lay obliged, and waited while Luhan ‘looked’ at him.  “Don’t you look snazzy,” he said, but his voice was oddly flat.  “Don’t forget to put on shoes.”

Lay stuck his tongue out at the camera.  “That wasn’t the question,” he reminded the AI.

“Mm,” Luhan said, in an eerie echo of Baekhyun.  It set off just as many butterflies in his stomach coming from the hidden speakers as it had his phone.  “No hair gel.  The bed-head look is a good one on you.”

Lay rushed back into the bathroom and tried to see himself objectively.  He never paid any attention to his hair, unless it was to push or flip it out of his face while he was working.  Although his first inclination was to believe Luhan was teasing, he realised after a few moments reflection that it actually  _did_  look good on him.  He straightened it slightly so that it fell more evenly, and then went in search of socks.

Although Luhan made fun of his ‘primping,’ he was ready to go with more than enough time to get himself to the restaurant a few minutes early. 

“Take the import,” Luhan called to him through the combutton while he was in the elevator.  Lay made a dirty noise with his tongue.

“I’m not letting you spy on me any more than you already can,” he said.  “And just for the record…”  He unpinned the badge from his jacket, removed the decorative cover – this one made it look like a band symbol, and was geared for his disguise as a normal twenty-five year old who had normal hobbies like concerts and movies – and twisted the combutton so that the microphone capabilities were shut off.  Luhan would neither hear nor speak to him.  It was nearly impossible to destroy the combuttons themselves, and there was no way to kill the GPS tracking, but he could and did considerably narrow the band of visual range and turn off the mic and the speaker.  Luhan was going to be furious with him later, or – he had to remind himself, and hated that the need for those reminders was coming more and more often, that Luhan was a computer and didn’t  _actually_  feel anything – he might report it to one of the higher-ups and get Lay suspended if the infraction was deemed serious enough. 

For a genuine, personal date, he didn’t think it would happen, which was why he dared to do it in the first place.  Besides, it was the first time he’d ever turned the combutton off in a year and a half of active-duty as an agent.  Certainly  _that_  had to count for something.  He replaced the cover, replaced the button, and climbed behind the wheel of his personal vehicle, with none of the Agency’s little tricks, gadgets, or gizmos that Sehun was prone to installing. 

Without fear that he would be overheard, recorded, or any of the other minor indignities he suffered through regularly, Lay turned up the radio, spared a thought for how weird it was to not have Luhan’s commentary on his music choices, and sang along to the songs he knew.

 

Dinner was a pleasant, if uninteresting affair.  Uninteresting in that nothing serious went wrong, Lay amended silently.  He kept waiting for Luhan to make a comment and then remembered he’d turned he speakers off.  Luhan could –  _possibly_  – he’d  _hinted_  that it could be done, but Lay had never seen him actually employ it – engage the radio speaker system of the restaurant for his own uses if it was a bonafide emergency.  Or they could use his cell phone. 

But he’d done good work – Ace himself had congratulated him on his work in the warehouse – and they shouldn’t need to.  So he relaxed, and except for the few brief moments of loneliness that passed quickly and were forgotten sooner, enjoyed his meal with Baekhyun.  The food was  _very_ good, and the company stimulating.

 _In more ways than one,_  Lay thought.  Baekhyun had engaged him in a political debate about their country’s northern neighbours, all the while disrupting his thoughts and his arguments with a feather-light touch on the back of his hand and a small, secretive smile.  When the meal was through, Lay followed Baekhyun to the theatre, where they bickered good-naturedly for a moment over which film to see before settling on one that was appealing to them both. 

Once in the darkened theatre, the maddening caress on his palm continued until Lay was practically writhing in his seat.  He stole glances of Baekhyun out of the corner of his eyes and found the other man apparently focused intently on the film.  About halfway through, he caught Baekhyun’s eye, and was startled to find him leaning closer.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” Baekhyun warned.  In the back of Lay’s mind was a tremulous voice warning him that it was cheap and skeezy to make out in the back of a theatre, but his body reacted with a sharp inhalation of expectation.  Then he frowned and inhaled again, more purposefully.

“Do you smell that?”

Baekhyun paused, his intent expression turning to confusion before he sniffed as well. 

That was when a fire ate its way through the center of the screen, rapidly filling the crowded theatre with smoke and destroying the picture.  People in the crowd were screaming and throwing themselves over seats in a hurry to get away from the flames, which had engulfed the entire screen and were working on the walls.  Lay felt the same surge of adrenaline, but his training kept him calm.  More startling was the way Baekhyun took control of him, firmly ushering him into the near-empty aisle and holding Lay’s head down beneath his own jacket to help him escape the smoke.  The sprinkler system had kicked in by this point as well, and they were soaked before they made it to the safety of the parking lot.

“That was a shitty end,” Baekhyun said, watching the lights of approaching emergency vehicles.  “Do you want to stay and talk to them?”

Lay shook his head.  “I’m good,” he said.  “I have nothing to say anyway; we were there, the fire started, we got out.”  He coughed to clear the lingering feel of smoke in his lungs, and then found Baekhyun staring at him with an odd light in his eyes.  Without warning, Baekhyun seized him and Lay had to overcome his instinctive reaction to throw him down by main force.  A second later, he was glad he had when Baekhyun claimed his mouth, somehow managing to kiss him deeply while still not taking his time about it.  The kiss left Lay breathing hard, and Baekhyun smiled victoriously. 

“I’ve got to get going,” he said, voice husky.  “I’ll see you later?”

“Wild dogs couldn’t keep me away,” Lay replied, wondering how he was going to get back to his car in the state he was in.  He watched Baekhyun seek out his own car and drive away with a salute in Lay’s direction before he even made the attempt. 

*

Back at his apartment, Luhan was lurking in wait.  The second Lay walked through the door, Luhan pounced.

“You asinine, hard-headed, thick-skulled  _stubborn_  excuse for a talking monkey!  I  _told_  you not to go out with him!”

Lay paused in the act of pulling his shirt over his head.  “What?  Did you get anything on his background check?”

Aggrieved, Luhan answered in the negative.  “But the theatre caught fire!  You could have been killed!”

With his own temper heating up, Lay shouted back at him.  “If I’d gone on my own it  _still_  would have caught fire!  He was with me the whole time!  Do you think he might have snuck away and started it?  Why are you so against my dating habits?”

Luhan was silent long enough that Lay thought he might have gotten the last word in.  No such luck, however.  “I just don’t like him!”

Lay made a fed-up noise and continued pulling his clothes off, wrinkling his nose at the smell of soot and smoke and fire that clung to them before heading for the shower.  His lips still tingled with the aftermath of Baekhyun’s devastating kiss. 


	4. With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

**Chapter Four – With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?**

 

“Get up, you lazy chunk!”

Lay cracked one eye open at Luhan’s shouting.  “What?”

“I have important, vital, and  _life-changing_  news!  Wake up and talk to me!”

He closed his eyes again, and debated the merits of actually getting out of bed to talk to Luhan.  Then he considered the other side of the argument, which was that he was warm, comfortable, and had been in the middle of a particularly pleasant dream.  Maybe if he fell back asleep fast enough, he could get back into it.  “Uh,  _no_ ,” he said, and pulled the blankets over his head. 

“If I had hands right now,” Luhan growled, and then apparently pumped up the volume.  “ _GET UP!”_

Startled, Lay rolled away from the source of the noise – and right off the far end of his bed.  Hitting the frigid, seldom-used side of the floor, he gave a few choice four-letter words to Luhan at the top of his voice before literally crawling back into his bed.  “I’m awake, you plastic piece of shit, what the hell do you want?”

Mornings he was woken by Luhan were never very high on his list of favourite things.  Although, they did rate quite high on his List of Reasons He Hated Luhan.  So far, that list contained one thing: Luhan’s tendency to wake him up. 

“You’re still in bed,” Luhan argued. 

“I’m not going back to sleep any time, but my apartment’s cold.  The bed is heated.  Therefore, the bed is the most appropriate place for me to be right now.  Speak, or I will personally go right down to the Agency  _right now_  and not only request a transfer, but have you permanently dismantled.   _What do you want?”_

“They caught they guy they think set the fire.”

Lay sat bolt upright in bed.  “It was  _arson?_ ”

Luhan sounded smug.  “It was definitely arson.  A very clear accelerant, splashed around in the maintenance room of the screen and ignition site including the charred remains of the match used to light it.”

“So who was it?”

“You’ll never figure this one out on your own.  If I wasn’t blessed with supreme computational power, I never would have figured it out either.”  He still sounded superior.  Lay gestured impatiently, forgetting for a moment that Luhan couldn’t see into his bedroom.

“Get on with it!  Who was it?”

“D.O.”

“No,” Lay breathed.  “Too obvious.”

“The cops had him in hand – he confessed to everything.  They didn’t even know what they’d got until they ran his prints, and by that time, someone had busted him out.  He was down at the station for all of about twenty minutes.”

Lay’s elation turned sharply to frustration.  “If he got out, why did you wake me up to tell me about it?”

“It’s nearly ten in the morning,” Luhan said.  “You need to stop sleeping so late.  It’s bad for your biorhythms.”

“Lu _han,_ ” Lay growled.  Luhan seemed to get the unspoken message and fell silent.  But Lay was well and truly awake now, the last wisps of dream already fading from his consciousness.  Seeing no other alternative, Lay threw back the covers and let the cold air of his apartment assault him for a moment before he dressed.  “Am I going out tonight?”

“I’m not your PDA,” Luhan replied.  “And oh, are you talking to me again already?”

“Just – answer – the question.”

“No, no missions  _scheduled._   We’ve got some others tracking D.O. right now and getting a lock on his current location as well as whoever let him out in the first place.  Everyone’s saying Kris, but I doubt Kris and D.O. are such bosom buddies that Kris himself would walk into a prison office and open the door for him.  Anyway, long-story-short: No missions.  But be aware that we might need you later.”

Reassured, Lay dressed in his slob-clothes – a pair of loose, baggy sweatpants that had seen better days, a ragged old tee-shirt, and a hoodie from his high school track team that was nearly three sizes too big.  Feeling warm and cozy at last, he ordered a pizza before going to his fridge.  He waffled between beer and a carbonated soft drink before deciding that drinking alone so early in the day was a sad sign.  He opted for the soda. 

“You’re a funny guy,” Luhan said.  Lay looked up, knowing there were cameras somewhere in the kitchen.

“I’m not funny,” he said.  “Why?”

“Yesterday, dressed to the nines, today dressed for dumpster diving.”  One of the wallscreens swirled and two pictures of Lay appeared side by side – one in his fancy date clothes, barefoot, he noticed – Luhan had captured that image from before he’d gotten fully dressed – and the other as he was walking into the kitchen just a few minutes ago. 

“I’m having a personal day,” Lay said.  “I was nearly killed last night.   _Again._ ” 

“It’s a dangerous job.”  Luhan fell silent, and Lay went to find a movie and set up for his break-day. 

It lasted only a few hours before Luhan was calling him again.

“I’m not happy about this,” Luhan began, doubtfully.  Lay, dozing fitfully on the couch, jerked to alertness with a groggy sound.  Belatedly, Luhan’s words filtered through his brain and he groaned.

“You have  _got_  to be kidding me.”

“I really,  _really_  wish I was.  I don’t think you should be allowed back out on your own.”

Lay scoffed.  “What am I, a dog?  A little kid?”

“You had no backup, besides me.  I can’t do anything to help you  _in situ._ ”

Eyeing the clock, Lay gauged that with whatever news Luhan was about to deliver, it was late enough to rationalise a harder drink and fetched a green bottle from his fridge.  Downing half of it in one go, he leaned up against the counter and stared balefully around, trying to locate one of the cameras.  “So what are you getting at?”

“Two of our other agents have run D.O. back to ground – surprisingly, in that warehouse where the exchange went down.  Sources right now say he has no link to it, but we all heard One telling his cronies to call D.O. to take care of the people they’d traded with – one of whom happened to be in that theatre last night.  Unsurprisingly, he didn’t make it.”

Interested, Lay straightened.  “So I wasn’t the target of that fire at all,” he said.  “I  _knew_  you were overreacting!”

“Negative,” Luhan replied.  “I neither act, nor react, and therefore cannot  _over_ react.”

“I call bullshit.”

“Think what you’d like.  The point is, they want you to enact the takedown.”

Lay dropped the bottle.  Luckily it was empty, and doubly-lucky that it bounced instead of shattering.  “You have got to be kidding.  Why me?”

“Did you think Ace was joking when he said you were the best field operative he’s got?”  One of the wall-screens in the living room beeped.  “Take a look.”

With a suspicious glance around the kitchen, Lay retrieved the bottle and went into the sitting room.  There on the wall were several records displayed, with identifying information marked out. 

“By the way, this is classified information.  But see, Agent A, here, only has half your current success rate.  And Agent B is on probation for… a problem with his contact.  You’re on the far right, as Agent C.” 

Examining the case records side by side, it was obvious that Lay not only had more total cases than the other two, but a higher success rate as well.  “What kind of problem?”

“Ah, classified.  I can tell you that there are doubts about their ability to work with one another any longer.”

As infuriating as Luhan was sometimes, Lay felt a jolt of real panic at the thought that they might take him away and replace him with some new, strange AI-contact.  The longer the agent/AI team worked together, the more the AI would learn and adapt to the Agent – or that was the theory, anyway.  Even after more than a year together, Luhan showed no signs of becoming anything other than what he was – a pain in the ass.  Even still, Lay couldn’t imagine life without Luhan.  “I see,” was all he said. 

“Ahem,” Luhan said.  “Well, back to the matter at hand.  Ace wants you out there, but I don’t feel that it’s the best thing.  In order to solve the issue, we’re bringing it to you.  Do you want to take it?  I’m obligated to inform you that if you do, you’re going to be assigned a temporary field partner.”

Lay frowned, confused.  “I didn’t think agents were allowed to know each other personally?”

“We~ell…” Luhan replayed a sound clip of birdsongs.  “No.  It’s not another agent.  But it is a highly professional, highly trained team that we the Agency have employed before.  They’ve worked with operatives in the past, with a high success rate in the doubled missions.” 

The bird sound was puzzling until Lay realised it was meant to represent an innocent whistle.  Suspicious, he narrowed his eyes at one of the cameras.  “What’s the catch?”

“It’s a duo.  They can be a bit… unusual.”

Lay was beginning to lose patience.  “ _Just spit it out!”_

“ChanTao.”

“You have got to be joking.”

“They are  _very_  professional.  Discrete, powerful, a dynamic team.  I’ve already told you that they’ve been of invaluable assistance to our operatives in the past.”

“Chanyeol is  _insane,_ ” Lay said.  Luhan tried to interject, but Lay spoke over him.  “And Zitao is  _creepy_  as  _hell._ ” 

“He’s just calm.  Just because not everyone is a spastic ball of fluff like you,” Luhan started.

Lay walked into his room and slammed the door.  It didn’t actually do anything positive, but it felt good.  Luhan utilised the bedroom speakers.

“And Chanyeol is  _not_  insane.  He’s just –”

“Insane,” Lay muttered.

“ _Trigger-happy,_ ” Luhan corrected.  “And he’s resolved that since the last time the three of you worked together.”

“The last time we worked together, it was my second ever mission, and he nearly shot  _me._   This does not predispose me to good thoughts about him!”

Luhan made a thoughtful noise.  “Well, he does still have a slightly unhealthy affection for his weapons, but I’m serious that he’s resolved the issue.”

“That’s so comforting,” Lay said, sarcasm dripping from his voice.  But he was resigned at this point; things were heating up and it looked like vacation days were a thing of the past until everything was settled. 

Luhan, who was either incredibly perceptive or just an overbearing jackass, sensed his silent capitulation. “Meet down at the Agency as soon as you’re able.  With luck, you can run the mission tonight, bring D.O. back in, and  _then_ you’ve been promised a decent vacation.”

“Oh, then, great,” Lay muttered.  But he stripped and got in the shower anyway.

 

At the Agency, the girl behind the front desk saluted him with her convenience-store coffee cup.

“Haven’t I seen you in here a lot recently?”

“Apparently everyone else is incapable of performing to the Agency’s high standards,” Lay said, not entirely joking.  He knew he could have refused, and one of the other agents would have gone out after D.O., but he didn’t trust them to make a good job of it.  At least if he was there, he  _knew_  it would go well.

He couldn’t shake the feeling in the pit of his stomach that ChanTao was not the answer, however.  He just  _knew_  they were going to mess him up.  Entering the Agency proper, he immediately saw Zitao leaning against the wall, eyes closed and looking as though he didn’t have a care in all the world.  As Lay approached, his eyes opened and focused immediately.  Then he smiled.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said, and bowed gracefully.  Lay returned it, somewhat stiffly.  “I’ve heard you have some reservations about this mission, but I’d like to reassure you that Chanyeol has his …  _tendencies…_  under control.”  Then he stuck his hand out in the Western manner.  Bemused, Lay shook it.

“I don’t mean to offend,” he began, cautiously.  He was a strong, limber, talented man, but he’d seen Zitao – commonly called Tao by the Agency employees who had difficulty with his full name – put men who outweighed him down with a single touch.  It was the result of years of martial arts training, and although he never abused his power, Lay had also noted that the coiled tension in Tao’s body was almost the same as if he were walking around with a sign above his head reading, “I can kill you with two fingers.”  It was off-putting and slightly exhilarating at the same time, which always left Lay feeling off-balance with him. 

“We understand,” Tao said evenly.  The door he was beside burst open, slammed against the wall and started to swing closed, as Chanyeol made his entrance into the hall.  Lay recoiled automatically, but Chanyeol held up both his hands, fingers splayed wide, to prove he was unarmed. 

“It’s good to see you again!” Chanyeol said, fair buzzing with energy.  He made Lay tired just looking at him.  “Quit yakking out here and come on in so we can get this show on the road.”

Lay took a deep breath and forced down his reservations.

 

Later that night, they drove in companionable silence to the bolt-hole D.O. had been driven to.  Once they’d hidden the car and approached the entrance, Lay saw someone apparently standing guard outside the door, wearing a dark sweater with the hood drawn up to cover their face, but as he was dressed in much the same way, he looked immediately to the chest and saw a disguised combutton.   _It was another agent!_   He flashed a discreet hand-signal, palm down with fingers splayed, asking  _Anything?_  and received an answer in the form of the other agent sliding their hand horizontally.  No trouble. 

Beside him, Tao was silently looking around – Lay was gratified that he looked up, too, as well as down and behind himself – and Chanyeol was lovingly stroking the barrel of his gun with his free hand, watching the doors with narrow eyes. 

Chanyeol opened the door first, slipped in, and looked for immediate enemies.  “Clear,” he whispered, and Lay entered next, followed by Tao.  Lay was equipped with a pair of handcuffs and a bottle of mace, but the ‘deadly force’ authorization was held by Chanyeol.  Lay might not have been comfortable using a gun, but he still wished he at least  _had_  one.  It made him nervous seeing Chanyeol’s wide, almost goofy grin in the dim lighting afforded by the building, especially when he was still caressing his gun that way. 

This warehouse, instead of being a single large storage unit, was broken up into smaller spaces to be utilised as necessary.  Lay didn’t think that the owners had authorised D.O. to be there, but there was no one who would have argued with him over it and lived.  A quiet scuffle caught Lay’s ear and he tilted his head to try and figure out the source.

“So how are we going to do this?  Do I just go in and shoot him?” Chanyeol asked.  Lay shushed him, alarmed by the quiet noise.  It hadn’t repeated itself, which made it even more distressing.  “Whaat,” Chanyeol complained.  Lay repeated his motion for silence, certain he’d seen a moving shadow against a wall.  Tao added his argument to Lay’s, but Chanyeol ignored them both, thumbing the safety off on his weapon and bringing it up to take aim.

In the back of his mind, a voice was screaming,  _Abort, abort!_

Then the gunfire started.


	5. The Magic Circles and Unwanted Holes

**Chapter Five – The Magic Circles and Unwanted Holes**

 

A wave of it crashed around them, sending drywall crumbs flying as the automatic submachine gun perforated the walls.  Chanyeol and Tao dove to either side; Chanyeol rolled and came up on his knees, returning the barrage with one of his own while Tao scurried to get out of the way.  As a team, ChanTao was invaluably successful – between Tao’s hand-to-hand skills and Chanyeol’s deep and abiding love of all things long-distance, the two of them could take anyone on. 

It was Lay who was unaccustomed to such warfare, and he didn’t react quickly enough.  Both Tao and Chanyeol were out of his sight; his combutton was silent.  The rain of bullets was deafening as the sounds crashed off the walls and echoed back and forth, unendingly.  Over the ringing in his ears, Lay could barely make out the sound of Chanyeol’s laughter as he eagerly engaged D.O. in the gunfight. 

 _And Luhan tried to tell me he’s_ not _insane,_  he thought, crawling to stay under the spray of bullets.  When he was far enough away – he thought – he took to his feet, thinking that he was close to the exit.   _Let them get pumped full of lead,_  he told himself.  It wasn’t cowardice, either – he simply wasn’t equipped to deal with this.  He wasn’t armed, and he had no defense.   _If Chanyeol could have kept his mouth shut –!_

 Something struck him in the side, with enough force to knock him into the far wall.  Pain blossomed throughout his entire abdomen until his torso felt like it was on fire.  Without knowing how he’d gotten there, Lay found himself lying on the ground, pain radiating through him in bursts.  He put his hand to his side, where the pain began, and distantly noted that it felt strange.  Wet.

He drew his hand up, and in the dusky light could see that it was dripping red.   _So bright,_  he thought.  It looked like paint.  His hand was trembling, and his senses seemed to waver in and out of focus.  Everything went very dark, and then became very light.  Someone vaulted over him – Lay could see enough to recognise that it wasn’t Chanyeol or Tao – turned, and sprayed bullets back the way he’d come.  When the man paused and looked down at him, Lay recognised D.O. 

“Heh,” he said.  “Sorry about that.”  He gestured with his gun to the wound in Lay’s side, and then turned and bolted.  Lay turned his attention back to his hand, all three of them.  Luhan was shouting something at him, but it seemed like it was coming through a very long tunnel.  It echoed weirdly, and didn’t sound like Luhan at all.  Distantly, Lay realised that his blood-stained fingers were now in view of the camera on the combutton, and Luhan – or whoever – was aware that he’d been wounded. 

From somewhere on Mars, he heard Chanyeol and Tao shouting to one another.

“He’s gone!” Tao said.

“I’m not hit,” Chanyeol replied.  The words sounded like gibberish, and suddenly Lay’s hand felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.  It fell to the ground with a dull thud.  Even the pain was beginning to fade away. 

“I’m fine,” Tao called.  “Where’s Lay?”

He heard his name, and tried to answer.  His mouth felt numb, and his tongue was too thick.  The words wouldn’t come. 

Then someone was leaning over him.  “Tao, he’s here!  He’s hurt!”

With a supreme effort of will, Lay focused on the two Chanyeols looming over him as they tore off their shirt, revealing a bullet-proof vest.

 _I need one of those next time,_  Lay thought, and made a mental-note to himself to ask Luhan to requisition one.  With the wadded up shirt in their hands, the Chanyeols pressed it against Lay’s side, setting off a fresh pulse of agony.

“Hold on,” the Chanyeols said.  Now there were four of them, and they wouldn’t hold still.  Lay followed them as long as he could, but the room was getting dark.  “You’re going to be okay.”

It was the last thing he heard clearly.  His final thought was,  _That’s a relief…_

*

He seemed to be flying, or floating.  His entire body ached.  He could feel each individual hair on his body, because they all hurt, too.  The next thing he saw was the inside of a car.  Then bright lights.  A lot of people were standing over him.  The pain washed through him, an unrelenting tide of agony.  Gradually, it went away, replaced by a soft, dreamy sensation. 

Sometimes there were people around him.  He recognised Tao, who looked nervous, and Chanyeol.  He wanted to tell Chanyeol that if he’d shut his damn mouth, D.O. wouldn’t have known where they were.  The words just didn’t come, though.  The thoughts drifted through his mind, disconnected from each other and his mouth.  He saw Sehun, and he thought he’d seen Baekhyun but it might have been wishful thinking.  He saw someone completely unfamiliar, with huge dark eyes set into a small, round face.  He thought it might have been Ace, or one of the other agents.

“Please don’t die,” they said. He didn’t even recognise the voice. Then they were gone, and Lay was alone in a dark room.  His head felt clearer than it had since that fateful moment when the bullet slammed into his side.  Lay remembered suddenly that he’d been shot, and jerked upright with alarm.

It hurt, but it was a manageable type of pain.  He touched his side, which was tender but dressed in clean bandages.  Then as he looked around, he recognised the medical bay of the Agency.  He’d known they employed doctors and psychiatrists, and had visited Medical for broken bones and other minor injuries.  They couldn’t exactly bring their wounded agents to a public hospital, where the authorities would ask unanswerable questions.  He had no idea what day it was, or what time.  He was shirtless, and didn’t know where his combutton was.

A pleasant, contralto female voice spoke over the speakers.  “Good evening, Agent Lay,” she said.  “My name is Minhyeo, the medical supervisor; designation AI-M29201.  How are you feeling?  Do you need anything?”

“Water,” Lay said, and carefully readjusted himself so that he was laying back comfortably.  His head was pounding, and his mouth was drier than the Gobi desert.  He’d never realised they used AIs in Medical, and then decided that they’d probably found a good system and kept repeating it. “Status of Luhan, designation AI-L30995?”

Luhan’s voice came over the speakers.  “I’m here,” he said.  “You’ve been unconscious for two days.” 

“What happened with D.O.?”

“We lost him.”

Lay sat upright again.  Luhan started to protest, but Lay ignored him.  “I told you – I  _told_  you not to send me out there with Chanyeol!”

Luhan sounded contrite.  “I know.  I’m sorry.  Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“I went on my own, and the worst thing that happened was being knocked out for a couple of hours.  I went with backup – on  _your_  word, I expect – and I get  _shot.  Shot!_   I could have been  _killed!_ ”

“I know,” Luhan repeated.  “Don’t you think I don’t know this already?  You were damn lucky.”

“No thanks to  _you,_ ” Lay sneered.  A smiling, pretty-faced attendant entered with a laden tray, forcing him to control his expression. 

“Doctor says you’ll be good to go soon, Agent Lay,” she said, arranging the tray on the small table that swung over the bed.  The requested water was there, as well as a supposedly ‘nourishing’ meal.  Lay knew from experience that it tasted like cardboard with salt on it, but he was hungry and it was better than nothing.  “They’ll want to make sure the infection’s gone, but you’re healing nicely.” 

She breezed out, leaving Lay to eat his meal in peace.  Between bites, he berated Luhan, more for his own sense of fairness than anything else.  No matter how human Luhan seemed at times, he was still a computer.  He could feign guilt, but never really feel it. 

“Your damn mother-henning cost our target,” Lay growled.  “I am  _not_  going back out into the field with them, do you hear me?”

“Perfectly,” Luhan said.  “Lay, for what it’s worth… I’m sorry.  That shouldn’t have happened.”

It wasn’t worth much.  Luhan had computed his chance of success alone versus with a team, and obviously decided he needed backup, but it had turned out to be worse than working alone.  At least he could trust  _himself_  to keep quiet during a mission!  Lay changed the subject, feeling his blood-pressure starting to rise.  It did no good to throw a temper-tantrum at a computer.  “So what went wrong?”

“D.O. was alerted to your presence, and yes, it was probably because of Chanyeol.  He’s being punished for not following the order of his superior in the field, by the way.  He took steps to ambush you before you could get to him.  Chanyeol engaged him in a firefight, and you were actually struck by a ricochet.  I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that it wasn’t Chanyeol’s fault.”

“Thrilled,” Lay groused. 

“Once you went down, D.O. fled the premises.  Tao went after him briefly, but lost him.  Chanyeol stayed to help you, administered first aid, and got you into the car and then back here.  Your wound became infected,” Luhan added, his voice distant and almost clinically dispassionate.  “According to the doctor, you were feverish and unconscious for fourty-three hours, but the antibiotics seem to be doing their work.  And as the nurse said, you’re healing well otherwise.”

Luhan was silent for a long time.  Lay opened his mouth to add something, but Luhan interrupted before the words came out.

“You have three weeks medical leave,” Luhan said.  “ _Enforced_  medical leave.  I’m not even allowed to  _mention_  work to you.”

Lay pushed the tray aside, feeling that he couldn’t take another bite of the god-awful food.  “That’s some good news, at least.  I’ve never been so busy.”

“Stop being flawless, then.”

“Psh.  How is completely  _failing_  my last two missions after being overpowered  _flawless?_ ”

“The way you handled yourself.  Very professional.  You didn’t freak out, even after being injured.”

“I think I was in shock,” Lay said, thinking back over the failed mission and how it took actually seeing the blood on his hand for him to realise that he’d been injured, severely.  “I’ve never been shot before,” he added.  “I didn’t expect it to hurt so much.” 

Which was true.  In movies, people got shot and they fell down and died.  There was never any impression that they were suffering as it happened.  Luhan lapsed into silence.  Lay laid back down and drifted into an uneasy sleep. 

 

It was another three days before the doctors released him from Medical.  Lay went straight back to his apartment, but not before stopping at the coffee shop for a decent drink and a tasty snack.  He didn’t see Baekhyun, for which he was grateful.  He missed him, and was eager to see him again, but he didn’t think he would be allowed or if Luhan would have him thrown back into the hospital bay and confined there until he was fully healed. 

When he entered the apartment, he was surprised to see the pizza box still on the counter, and the bottle of beer still on the ground where he’d dropped it the day of the failed mission.

“The maid hasn’t been allowed in,” Luhan explained, when Lay asked him.  “If you don’t want to take it out, she’ll be permitted to resume duties today, now that you’re back.”

“Sure,” Lay said, wondering why they’d kept her away.  Luhan was unlikely to tell him, and he didn’t bother to ask. 

 

Several days later, Lay was out for a walk, sick to death of being trapped indoors with nothing to do.  He was wearing the combutton as a matter of habit, although Luhan was silent.  The pain in his side was negligible, and the wound was healing apace; he’d passed several text messages back and forth with Baekhyun, who was just as busy with his job as Lay had been with his own. 

He had a strange sense of not-being-alone that put him on guard.  When he caught sight of Chanyeol ducking out of sight behind a tree, his temper erupted.  Pulling out his phone for disguise, he muttered, “Luhan, you had better have a  _damn_  good explanation for this.”

Luhan, to his credit, didn’t even have to ask what it was.  “I do.  Get back to your apartment so I can talk to you.”

Lay spun on his heel and marched back to his home, slamming the door shut behind him.  “Explain,” he barked.

“D.O. saw you, full on.  It’s possible you may become a target, if he realises you didn’t die.  It’s for your own protection.”

Lay picked up the nearest thing to hand – an ugly glass vase he’d always hated – and threw it into the wall.  Not for the first time, he wished Luhan was a real person, mostly so he could throttle him.  Throwing vases was ineffective, if satisfying, and it only made a mess for the maid to clean up later.

His phone lit up with a timely message from Baekhyun.   _Want to have lunch?_

“What is that?” Luhan asked.  Lay imagined he could hear gears whirring as Luhan attempted to angle one of the cameras to catch sight of his phone. 

“None of your goddamned business,” Lay snarled.   _When and where?_   He typed back.

A picture message was his reply, a popular outdoor café in a nearby park.   _Here and now,_  Baekhyun responded.

“I’m going out,” Lay said.  “Call ChanTao  _off_ my tail or I swear I will throw the combutton in the gutter and never come back.”

Luhan gasped, scandalised.  “You can’t do that!  Just tell me where you’re going, at least.”

“So you can monitor it anyway?  So you can tell them where to go to find good hiding spots?  Hell  _no._   Figure it out.”  Lay swung his jacket on, twisted the combutton so that Luhan’s audio connection was turned off and his visual radius narrowed, and left the apartment not even ten minutes after he’d walked into it.

He walked to the park, and was met by Baekhyun at the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the café’s dining area.  “It’s good to see you again,” Baekhyun said, with his customary eye-dip that left Lay feeling flattered and flustered.  They were seated by a waitress, who left menus with them and promised to return shortly.  After placing their orders, the two of them made small-talk and chatted lightly, mostly commenting on the people who were out enjoying the warmth of the day.

It was turning an upsetting morning into a fabulous afternoon, and Lay was just beginning to relax.  There was no sign of either Chanyeol  _or_  Tao, and Baekhyun’s company was thrilling and warm.  That was when he caught sight of Suho, another of Kris’s confederates, lurking just outside the café. 

He got his expression under control before Baekhyun looked up from his meal, but suddenly, despite the sun, the day felt very cold.  He was torn between making excuses to Baekhyun and going after Suho, or letting Suho get away.  Finally deciding to compromise, Lay excused himself to the restroom and snuck around the back, trying to figure out where Suho had gone, and whether or not he’d actually seen him.  When there was no sign of him, Lay decided he was becoming as paranoid as Luhan and was probably seeing things.  He’d expected to see someone, after all, though he would have expected his mind to conjure Tao, Chanyeol, or D.O.

Upon returning to the table, he found it deserted.  The waitress stopped him and apologised.

“He said he had an urgent phone call from work and had to leave,” she said.  “He wanted to say he’s sorry, and he’ll call you when he gets a chance.  The bill is paid, if you’d like to stay a while longer,” she added.  Lay declined, feeling depressed, and returned to his apartment. 

To his utter surprise, Luhan was silent when he got back in.  “What, no nasty comment to make?”

“I wish you wouldn’t go out with him,” Luhan said tartly. 

Lay rolled his eyes.  “Explain to me  _why_  and I might decide to stop.”

“I  _can’t,_ ” Luhan said.  “It’s just… something doesn’t sit right about him.”

“You have to  _have_  guts to get a ‘gut feeling,’” Lay said, snidely.  He hated fighting with Luhan, but he also wasn’t about to have his life arranged by a computer, either.  He retreated to the relative safety of his bedroom and took comfort where he could, with the movie  _The Lion King_.

Some time later, his phone rang, announcing a call from Baekhyun.  He paused the movie – he was halfway into the sequel – and answered it.

“I am so, so sorry, Yixing,” Baekhyun said, almost before Lay had stopped speaking.  “I didn’t want to leave you behind like that after I asked you out, but I didn’t have a choice, my boss called.”  He sounded sincere, and abjectly unhappy.  Lay considered letting him stew in it for a while, but took pity on him instead.

“I’ll forgive you on one condition,” Lay said. 

“Name it,” Baekhyun agreed immediately.

“Come over for a while.”

Baekhyun’s voice dropped, becoming husky.  “I’d love to,” he said.  “But I don’t know where you live.”

Lay gave the address and his apartment number, and Baekhyun promised to be over as soon as he was able.  Lay hung up and finished the movie, but couldn’t concentrate on it – his entire brain was taken up with thinking of Baekhyun in his apartment.

To his surprise, Luhan didn’t have anything to say about it.  Deciding to count himself lucky, Lay refused to mention it.  A short time later, there was a knock on his door.

Lay opened it cautiously, and saw Baekhyun standing outside with a small, secretive smile on his face.  Pulling it wider, he invited Baekhyun inside.  The maid hadn’t been through yet, and so the shards of the vase still lay scattered along one wall.  Lay flushed to think of his own poor housekeeping skills, but Baekhyun didn’t seem to notice.

“You live here?” he said, looking around.

“I sleep here,” Lay said, honestly.  “I’m not in it, much.”

Baekhyun completed his survey and turned back to Lay with a wider smile.  “It’s nice,” he said. 

“Would you like a drink?”

“Please.”  Baekhyun trailed him into the kitchen, still with that mysterious smile on his face, and Lay could clearly feel Baekhyun’s eyes on his rear end when he bent over in the fridge to retrieve a couple of bottles.  When he straightened, bottles in hand, he found Baekhyun in his personal space, backing him into the counter.  Once he had Lay pinned, he lowered his face and kissed him senseless. 

Lay was surprised to find they were still in the kitchen when Baekhyun pulled away, lips swollen and face flushed.  He offered the beer in silence and watched as Baekhyun twisted the top off and threw his head back to drink.  Mesmerised by the sight of Baekhyun’s long fingers and the slender column of his throat, he nearly forgot he was holding a bottle of his own.  Vacantly, he opened it and took a small sip.

“I like your kitchen, but it’s not particularly comfortable,” Baekhyun said.

“My room is completely off-limits,” Lay replied.  “It is, to my utter shame, more like the aftermath of a natural disaster in there, and I’m not letting you see it until I’ve had a chance to pick everything up.”

Baekhyun smirked at him.  “Your couch looks nice enough,” he said, and they moved back into the sitting room, Baekhyun taking control once more by pushing him down and crawling into his lap to kiss him.  This position brought their hips together, and Lay pushed up into him only to find Baekhyun pushing back. 

Between kisses, Baekhyun said, “A word of caution.  I am  _always_  on top.”

Through the growing haze of arousal, Lay gathered his resources and rolled them so that Baekhyun was sitting with Lay in his lap.  “Always?”

“Nothing comes near my ass,” Baekhyun said firmly, and rolled them again.  Lay deliberately put his hands on Baekhyun’s hips, feeling the taut muscles beneath his fingers.

“Not even like this?”

“That’s as close as you get.” 

Baekhyun was busy undoing the buttons of Lay’s shirt, distracting him by sucking a mark into the skin where his throat met his collarbone.  He dragged his fingers up Lay’s side, lightly enough that it tickled and Lay twitched before working his own hands between them and opening Baekhyun’s shirt in turn.  He discovered a ribbed tank top beneath the cotton overshirt, and deliberately slid his hands underneath it, drawing it upwards and exposing Baekhyun’s abdomen.  When his questing fingers found Baekhyun’s nipple, he drew back in surprise.

Baekhyun laughed.  “Like it?”

Lay held the undershirt up so he could get a clear look at what his hands were telling him.  Both nipples sported a gleaming silver ring that pierced them both.  “Holy  _hell,_ ” he whispered, and touched one.  “Didn’t that hurt?”

Baekhyun’s breath hissed in through clenched teeth.  “Only a little, at first,” he admitted.  “It’s  _so_  worth it now.  Especially when you pull on them like that.” His hips thrust down against Lay’s in time with the gentle tugs Lay exerted on the metal hoops, and Lay slid down a little to give him a better angle.  Arousal was burning its way through his veins, and it wouldn’t have taken much to set him off at that point. 

Baekhyun’s phone rang with a tone that was rapidly becoming familiar to Lay.  “God _dammit,_ ” he swore.  Disappointment rushed through Lay like a wildfire.  He knew what it meant.  Baekhyun ignored his phone for the span of two more repetitions of the song before throwing himself violently off the couch to where he’d dropped his coat and retrieved his phone.

“Yes?” he said, curtly, and listened for a moment.  The Cheshire-cat smile that stretched his lips when he looked at Lay was inflaming.  “ _Out,_ ” he said deliberately, his expression coy.  His face slackened until it was neutral, and he shifted his gaze to the wall instead.  “Yes, sir,” he said.  “Yes.”  A pause.  “I understand.” 

Lay leaned forward and fetched his beer off the coffee table.  When Baekhyun hung up the phone and began button his shirt, Lay sighed.  “You’ve got to go, haven’t you?”

“Sometimes I really,  _really_  hate my job,” Baekhyun said.  Lay trailed him to the front door, and leaned against the jamb while Baekhyun shrugged into his coat.  He didn’t know what kind of a picture he made standing there with hickeys rising on his neck, his hair disheveled and his shirt undone, but Baekhyun paused when he turned back around, and closed the distance between them with two large steps, snatching Lay up by the hair and kissing him.  “If it were anyone but my boss,” he murmured into Lay’s mouth.  “Dream about me tonight,” Baekhyun commanded, and released him.

Lay took a long sip of his beer to cover his reaction, and nodded.  “You too,” he said.  Still cursing and swearing, Baekhyun tore himself away and stomped towards the elevator, already pulling his phone back out and dialing.  Lay stepped back into his apartment and let the door swing shut. 

“Are you – have you  _completely_  lost your  _mind?_ ” Luhan asked.  Lay gave a flat smile. 

“I was wondering when you were going to say something.”

“What in Dante’s circles of Hell possessed you to invite him back  _here?_ ” Luhan demanded.  With his body still buzzing, Lay finished the beer. 

“Chill,” he said, and added, “You prude.”  Luhan sputtered incoherently.  “It’s not like there’s anything identifiable in here,” he added.  “And it’s not like I took him back into my room, where there are personal things.”

“That’s not the point!” Luhan shouted. 

Still exuding a calm he didn’t feel, Lay went into his bedroom and shut the door behind him.  Allowing himself to copy Baekhyun’s secret smile, he pitched his voice to carry.  “Voice command override,” he said clearly. 

“What are you doing?  Don’t you do that, Zhang Yixing –”

“Audio shut-down,” Lay finished.  Luhan’s voice fell silent before it restarted from outside the room. 

“Turn that back on  _right now!_ ” Luhan bellowed.  Lay stuffed the crack beneath the door with a towel, further muffling Luhan’s voice.  The override command could be turned off by the AI if it was abused, but Lay had never used it once in the nearly-five-years he’d been in the apartment, courtesy of the Agency.  All it did was turn off the microphones hidden in the room, so that Luhan couldn’t hear him, and prevent Luhan from speaking directly into the room himself. 

With Luhan thus stifled, Lay fell backwards onto his bed and reached into his pants, intent on finishing the work Baekhyun had started.


	6. Knight to E-6? Checkmate. [Part One]

**Chapter Six – Knight to E-6?  Checkmate. [Part One]**

 

 

The next morning, Lay woke refreshed and stretched, cat-like, before climbing out of bed.  “Voice command override,” he said, remembering that it needed to be done.  “Audio restore.”

“It’s about time,” Luhan grumbled.  “What if someone had come in during the night?”

By ‘someone’ Lay knew Luhan meant D.O.; apparently, Lay was still on his suspected-target list.  It had been long enough that Lay wasn’t worried about it, however.  He was nearly healed from the bullet-wound he’d taken on the last mission, and though it twinged occasionally it wasn’t causing him actual pain. 

“You would have seen them on the cameras in the rest of the apartment,” Lay said, flippant.  “And I know you’ve still got control of the override on your end; if it was a real emergency, I have complete trust in your ability to keep me safe.  It’s working with substandard employees that I dislike,” Lay added, taking a subtle dig at the ChanTao team whose reckless disregard for Lay’s expertise had ended with him shot and D.O. still at large. 

“Oh,” Luhan said, mollified.  Lay smiled, feeling like a little kid who’d gotten away with something when Luhan didn’t call him out for insulting ChanTao.  Although not technically agents in the same way Lay was, Chanyeol and Tao were nonetheless employed by the Agency.

 

It was nearly another week gone by, and Lay was starting to get bored with his enforced vacation time.  “Isn’t there anything I can do?  I’ll go to the Agency and file paperwork, if that’s what it takes,” Lay whined, begging Luhan to let him do  _something_  besides sit there. 

“Well,” Luhan said, slowly.  Lay pounced on him for it.

“I knew it!  You’ve got something in mind.”

“You’re still technically on medical leave,” Luhan warned.  “I shouldn’t even be telling you this.  Another agent was going to handle it.”

Lay made a rude noise to show his opinion of  _that._   “ _Was_  going to?”

“The, ah, prior incident I told you about in which they were being investigated for still hasn’t been resolved.”

“So I can do it?”

“Standby,” Luhan said, and the mic clicked off audibly.  Lay practically bounced in his seat, he was so impatient for Luhan to get back to him on whether or not he could get out and  _do_  something.  Finally, after a small eternity, the mic clicked back on.  “Proceed to headquarters for assignment,” Luhan said, and snickered when Lay whooped. 

When Sehun met him at the door, Lay grinned.  “Don’t they have anything better for you to do than run errands?”

Sehun shrugged.  “Not right now.  One of the computers has been acting up, but I’ll get to that tonight.”  He handed over the file once they got to the briefing room, and then placed himself in a seat to wait for Lay to read it.

“Making an attempt on Suho…?” he said, thoughtfully.  Sehun shrugged again, chewing on the end of an iced biscuit stick. 

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I just deliver the files, I don’t read them myself.  Word is, though, Chanyeol and Tao are in on this one.”

Lay stiffened.  He still hadn’t forgotten or forgiven the fact that it was Chanyeol’s ineptitude that had gotten him shot during the attempt to take down D.O.  “How nice,” he said blandly, and made a mental note to remind himself to let Luhan know that if anything else happened on this mission that was even remotely traceable to Chanyeol  _or_  Tao, he’d never work with either of them again. 

Flipping through the rest of the papers, Lay learned that the ChanTao team would be the muscle on this run, while his only job would be to find a way to positively identify and capture Suho.  Pictures were included, of Suho and his known confederates, including One.  The picture of One set off warning bells of recognition in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t place it immediately.  When he realised he’d come in face-to-face contact with One on the vase mission, they settled.  He hadn’t gotten a clear look at Kris’s right-hand-man during the mission itself, but after, he’d seen the camera footage from his combutton.  He shuddered, hoping One wouldn’t be there.  Having run into the man once was bad enough; One was a known sociopath, who had a fearsome reputation for unpredictability.  Just because he’d been content to let Lay out easily the first time didn’t mean Lay wouldn’t find himself with a knife in the back the next time their paths crossed. 

The details of the mission were terrifying.  Suho was rumoured to be at the top of a murder-ring using a ‘human-chess’ type of game for entertainment.  Desperate people were given weapons and forced to fight one another for the possibility of a large monetary reward.  It was vaguely reminiscent of the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome, though the Romans had never conceived of weapons like firearms.  Lay’s skin felt tight in an anticipatory reaction to the thought of what he was about to get involved with. 

“Oh,” Sehun said suddenly, startling Lay into dropping the papers.  He helped pick them up before continuing.  “Your glasses are ready,” Sehun said.  “You might need them, and I’ve got a couple other things for you, just in case.  I’ll be right back.”  Sehun excused himself, leaving Lay alone with the mission file. 

“You don’t have to do this,” Luhan said softly.  Lay started again anyway, not expecting Luhan to say anything. 

“I said I would,” he replied, and cringed at the defensiveness in his own voice.  Steeling himself, he made himself say it again.  “I’m committed,” he said firmly.  “At least there’s less that can go wrong on this mission.”

Luhan scoffed.  “Except the part where you face almost-certain  _death._   I don’t like this.”

Oddly touched by Luhan’s concern, Lay masked it and waved one hand dismissively.  “It’ll be fine,” he said.  Deep in his heart, he desperately hoped so.

Sehun returned with an armful.  “Help me with the door,” he said from behind a pile of fabric.  Lay obediently held the door open for him while he entered, eyeing the bundle curiously.

“I just heard from Ace, too,” Sehun said without preamble.  “We’ve had some people in and out of the ring a few times to see what went on, and you’ll be stripped of weapons and protective gear, so we’ve special-ordered this from the U.S.”  He handed Lay a pair of trousers and a button-down shirt.  “These are still prototypes, but proven effective in the field.  Bullet-proof clothing.  No bulky vest to deal with, and they can’t fault you for wearing clothes.”  A pair of shoes were added to the pile on Lay’s side of the table.  “Reinforced with Kevlar, also bullet-proof,” Sehun said.  Next came a cylindrical case.  “These are meant to look like prescription glasses, but they’ll actually convert light for you.  It’s a prototype too, but it’s tested well so far in training.  Most people can’t tell the difference; it’ll just look like your eyesight’s really bad.”

Lay withdrew the glasses, and found them to be ordinary looking, if slightly bulkier than he would have preferred.  “How do I turn them on?”

“Button on the left ear-hook turns it on and off.  If you can stand it, turn them on before you need them because you don’t want to be fumbling around in the dark.”

Lay slid the glasses onto his face and found they were heavier than expected, and tight-fitting.  He pushed the button on the arm and found it gave the edges of the lighted room a slightly green tinge.  When Sehun helpfully turned out the lights, the glasses became dark for a moment and then everything brightened as the lenses and the technology adjusted for the available light.  “Is anything visible from the outside?”

“Nope,” Sehun said.  “Just a very faint glow against your eyes, but that’s easy to miss unless someone knows exactly what they’re looking for.  Try not to break this pair, I like them.”

Lay wrinkled his nose as Sehun turned the lights back on.  “I didn’t break the last pair,” he said.

“You allowed them to be broken.”  Sehun sniffed.

“I did  _no_  – whatever.  What’s this?”  He picked up a small round plastic button.  It  _looked_  like a combutton, but it was slimmer and sleeker than the one he was used to using.

Sehun beamed like a proud parent showing off a straight-A child.  “Upgraded combutton.  Wider field of vision for the camera, clearer mic, and easier to use for you if necessary.”  He took it from Lay and demonstrated how the bottom half didn’t just rotate, but folded down to expose labeled buttons.  Lay examined it, extremely impressed.  Sehun revealed that it could either be disguised with the old covers, or it would camouflage itself to blend in with whatever he was wearing.  Since Sehun had on a striped shirt, he held it up against his own chest and pressed a small button on the top rim.  Immediately, the button seemed to fade.  When Lay took a closer look at it, he could see that it was just mimicking the pattern of the shirt.

“Wow!  How did you make it do _that?”_

Still looking pleased with himself, Sehun explained.  “I got the idea from the military working with ‘invisibility jackets,’” he said.   “They have cameras on one side and screens on the other, and whatever the camera picks up is projected onto the front, giving it the appearance of invisibility.”  He held the button flat in the palm of his hand, and Lay watched with interest as the button changed again to present the lines and tone of Sehun’s skin.  It looked like a strange sort of skin infection, but the concealment was effective. 

“It needs solar power to charge, but a few minutes in the sun each day should keep it working.  The invisibility will fade first if it starts getting too low on power,” Sehun warned.  “That’s your cue to get it into the sunlight, or trade it out.  Keep two with you at all times, just in case.”

“Got it,” Lay said, accepting two of the buttons.  Sehun gripped his hand suddenly.

“By all that’s holy, keep yourself safe out there,” he said, vehemently.  Lay met his gaze steadily, and nodded.

“I will,” he said.  With that, he took his new gear and changed into it before reporting to Ace’s office for ‘official assignment.’ 

Tao and Chanyeol were there already.  Lay bristled, but kept his comments to himself until after the briefing.  The general mission was exactly as had been laid out in the paperwork, but Ace had specific details to impart.  Chanyeol had infiltrated the cartel before, and had standing permission to carry his guns as a ranking bodyguard.  What he didn’t have was arrest authority, which was where Lay came in.  It was up to them to find a way to get in to a point where they would be able to positively identify Suho and make the arrest.  Kris, Number One, or any of his other associates, including D.O. were secondary targets, to be pursued only as long as they had Suho in custody. 

Lay was reluctant to trust his life to Chanyeol again, when the sharpshooter had endangered it once before, but set his misgivings aside.  This mission was too important to throw away on petty infighting.

After that, it was simply a matter of getting there and getting in.  Lay set his combutton to disguise itself against the black of his shirt, and climbed into the car with Chanyeol and Tao.

* * *

Guys and ladies, I'm so sorry it took so long for this tiny-ass update.  Nu'est is making their comeback next week (February 13th FTW!) and I have been highly, HIGHLY distracted. Also, other real life concerns (like online training for work) interfered with writing time.  I split this chapter into two parts not because it's huge, but so I would have something to give.  I'll work on it some more over the weekend, and hopefully have more to show by next week.  
  
Thank you!

 

PS; NU'EST FIGHTING. <3333 833 (any other l.o./\\.e.s out there with me?)


	7. Knight to E-6? Checkmate [Part 2]

**WARNING PLEASE, there is some FAIRLY GRAPHIC VIOLENCE in this chapter!  Reader discretion is advised.**

 

**Chapter Seven – Knight to E-6?  Checkmate. [Part Two]**

Tao briefed him in the car on their cover stories – Lay was going in as Yhang Lia, a Chinese businessman who’d amassed heavy gambling debts and was now using the Game to gain a chance to win the money and pay them off.  He changed into the rumpled suit they provided right there in the back of the car, and manfully ignored the comments Chanyeol made. 

Tao offered him a two way radio.  “Chanyeol has status within the ring from a prior U.C. we’ve run together,” he explained.  “He’ll get you in and get you set up.  I’ll be looking for Suho, but this thing will be for emergencies only.  I’ll let you know when and if I find him.  We’ll be acting as your backup, but it’s your job to get to him and take him out,” Tao added, unnecessarily to Lay’s point of view.  He was the only one of the three of them who had authority to arrest him.  The warrant was in his back pocket, hidden in a fold of his fake wallet. 

“Got it,” he said, and folded his hands in his lap to have something to do with them.  Now that the moment was upon them, he found himself getting nervous.  When he realised his fingers were twisting together, he sat on his hands to keep it from showing.  Then he had no more time to peptalk himself, because they were pulling to a stop in front of the innocuous-looking office building that served as a front for the cartel’s seedier businesses. 

Chanyeol walked up beside him, told his cover story to the guy at the door, and held it open when they were waved through.  The stench assailed Lay before his eyes even adjusted to the dim lighting.  The scent of fear was thick in the air, mingling with sweat and other, less definable odours. 

At some point, Tao had slipped away to begin his search for Suho’s whereabouts.  Chanyeol remained with Lay long enough to get him checked in.

“We don’t normally take walk-ins,” the burly man at the desk rumbled. 

 _Hired muscle,_  Lay thought dismissively, then eyed the giant morning star strapped to his back.  Not exactly your run-of-the-mill meathead, then.

Chanyeol grinned at him, despite the fact that the man was not only carrying a four-foot steel rod attached by a two-foot chain to a massive spiked ball, but also outweighed him by about a hundred pounds.  Not an ounce of it looked to be fat, either.  “You know I wouldn’t bring you trash,” he said brightly.  Lay kept his mouth shut and tried to look like a desperate director with gambling debts so large he was willing to risk his life. 

Meat-head looked him over once, then tugged on a painting hanging behind him.  It swung open to reveal a huge vault full of weapons.  He retrieved a long curved sword with a wicked-looking edge, tested it against his thumb, and then handed it to Lay, who staggered under the weight of it.  “Rules,” he thundered.  “There are no fucking rules.  Kill whoever the fuck you want, as long as you do it on the floor.  If you’re still standing when the bell rings, you win.”  He turned a gimlet eye on Chanyeol again.  “Hope he doesn’t owe you money,” he said.  “Scrawny-ass kid like this won’t last two seconds out there.”

Lay bristled.  “I’m not a kid,” he started, but Chanyeol clapped a hand over his mouth before anything else could come out.  Meat-head lifted one hand to the morning star looming over his shoulder, but then decided to let it slide. 

“Maybe five seconds,” he amended.  “For attitude.  Left door.”  He sat back down and returned to whatever he’d been doing when they walked in.  A counter above the door read 29:12:42, and as Lay watched, quickly counted down to 28:59:17.

“That’s when the next game starts,” Chanyeol whispered, and shuddered.  “I hate coming here.”

“Why do you?”

“Contacts are useful,” was all he said.  The silence stretched between them while Lay shifted the massive scimitar from one hand to the other.  Chanyeol finally sighed.

“Give me that, you’re going to exhaust yourself before we get down there.”  He took the sword and heaved it up over one shoulder, apparently with ease.  Lay had never considered himself weak before, but was starting to wonder if he should start lifting weights or something.  They entered an elevator, and Chanyeol punched in a complicated code before it would let him press the floor number. 

“This thing’s wired backwards,” he said.  “Pressing one takes you to the top floor, and pressing the thirty-nine takes you down into the basement.  We’re not going all the way down,” he added, punching the ‘37’ button with one finger.  “That’s the morgue, and hopefully we’re not heading there today.”

“Hopefully,” Lay repeated, alarmed.  Chanyeol waved it off.  “What’s on the other floors?”

Chanyeol made a face.  “I’m not sure you want to know.”

They lapsed into silence, and Lay considered that for all his trigger-happy tendencies, Chanyeol was an alright guy.  He did seem to have settled down – the first time Lay met him, he’d been a wild-eyed man in his mid-twenties, jumpy and prone to shooting at anything that moved.  ChanTao had been pulled off his team when ‘anything that moved’ was almost Lay himself, but he seemed calmer now.    Whether it was Tao’s creepy Zen influence, age, severe reprimands or just the things he’d been seeing every day if they were collecting contacts in a place like this, Lay didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to, either. 

The elevator rumbled to a stop and let out a cheerful  _ding._   The doors slid open and a sickening miasma rushed over him.  The scent of fear and sweat were stronger, but overlying the whole thing was blood.  The room looked like it was two entire floors with all the dividing walls knocked out, and only box seats for the spectators ringed the walls.  The floor itself was painted in a gruesome parody of a chessboard, with massive black and white squares alternating across the entire length of it.  A walkway along the outer edge lead to the stairs to access the seats.

A sea of humanity separated most of the seats from Lay.  Nervous, twitching people milled around on the giant chessboard, which was still stained here and there with blood.  An argument broke out between two contestants, and with a movement too fast to follow, one of them swung with a giant knife.  The blade passed through the other man’s neck like a hot knife through butter, and his head fell off just before the severed arteries began spurting blood.  A woman began screaming from somewhere, and two more musclebound meat-heads like the one who’d checked him in upstairs rushed onto the floor to cart away the body.  The abattoir smell intensified.

It was all suddenly too real for Lay.  He felt the blood drain from his face, and swayed for a moment before backing into a wall.  “I can’t go out there,” he said.  He’d never been a coward in his life, but this…

The woman was still screaming.  Someone yelled, “ _Shut up!”_  and when that didn’t work, a single shot rang out.  A woman on the white side of the board slumped to the ground, a fresh hole in her head leaking blood onto the floor.  Two more thugs ran out – or maybe they were the same ones, Lay couldn’t tell – and collected her body from the floor. 

“I’m going to be sick,” Lay muttered.  Chanyeol snatched him up by the shoulders and shook him. 

“You have to get across the floor.  Do you see Tao?”

Swallowing against the insistent nausea, Lay shook his head.  “No,” he said.

“He’s over there.”  Chanyeol spun him around and pointed.  Across the floor, Tao was waving from beneath one of the boxes.  Waving, and spastically pointing up.  Lay followed his finger up to the second-floor box seat, and saw Suho overlooking the killing floor with a Cheshire-cat grin on his face.  Lay felt his knees go weak, and would have fallen if Chanyeol hadn’t been holding him up.  As it was, he was going to have finger-shaped bruises on his shoulders tomorrow. 

Lay looked out across the crowd again and realised that he was going to have to get through every single murderous, armed, and dangerous one of them to even reach Suho. 

One of the body-thugs stopped beside them.  “Fifteen minutes,” he said.  “Get on the floor and get situated.”  He handed over a black jersey with the number fourteen on it in white.  There was a small spot of red in the shaft of the 1, and a hole through one side that was clearly a bullet hole.  Lay gagged. 

With clinical dispassion, Chanyeol took the jersey from him, shook it out, and dropped it over his head before handing him the scimitar.  “Just stay alive out there,” he said.  “It’s the only way, and you’re not going to do anyone any favours if you die.”

Lay swallowed rhythmically, trying to keep his stomach in his gut where it belonged, and nodded.  The sword wasn’t any easier to pick up the second time around, and there was no way he could casually carry it around on his shoulder the way Chanyeol had.  Steeling himself, he stepped through the gap in the little wall and found his way to an empty black square. 

When five minutes showed on the countdown clock, someone called over the loudspeaker. 

“Shut up, you lot!”  The noise quieted from a dull roar to silence.  “Thank you.  Now, I don’t care why you’re here, or what you do to get out.  The only rules here are there are no rules!  The last one standing at the end wins the prize.  Good luck!”

Lay had a bizarre flashback to the movie “Gladiator” as the line  _“We who are about to die salute you!_  passed through his mind.  It was a brief reminder that even some of the most civilized people on earth had been killing each other for sport for thousands of years.  Just because this was dressed up with modern weapons and a game, it didn’t make it any different.  Oddly enough, the thought was calming.  A plan began to form in his mind. 

There were four openings in the wall that lead to the seats.  Two of them were guarded by thugs.  All he had to do, he thought, was make it to the other side of the floor where Tao had been standing, and he’d be able to make it up to the seats where Suho was still reigning over the game board like an emperor. 

The clock counted down to ten seconds, and suddenly all of the spectators were counting down with it.  At zero, a gong rang out and the two sides surged towards one another.  Gunfire rang out, echoing across the vast space, and a few arrows buzzed through the air.  One passed so close to Lay that it left another hole in the jersey he was wearing, but it had been made as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ deal and there had been plenty of space between the arrow and his body.  His combutton crackled with static as Luhan mangled a transmission.  Lay jumped; he’d forgotten about the combutton. 

A wild-eyed woman in a business suit and pumps under her white jersey lifted the butcher’s knife she carried and let out a war-like scream.  Lay somehow managed to deflect her initial blow by bringing the scimitar up like a shield, and while she was gathering her wits, he hit her on the back of the head with the pommel and stepped over her when she went down, unconscious but still breathing. 

More gunshots ricocheted around the room.  Lay slipped in a spreading pool of blood and jammed one of his fingers when his arm went out to catch himself, but he didn’t think it was broken.  Then he realised that this was probably a safer place to be than upright, and he crawled awkwardly towards his goal, tugging the scimitar after him because it was better than going in unarmed.  He retched again when his hand came down in a steaming, bloody pile of guts.  The eviscerated man they belonged to was lying a few feet away, blinking rapidly.  Unable to believe he was still alive, Lay wasted precious moments going around him and hit the ground hard when someone else fell on top of him.  One eye bounced out of the socket and dangled by the optic nerve.  Lay could feel the nightmares lining up already, waiting for the moment he fell asleep later, but nerved himself by thinking about this being the last game ever.  Once they took out Suho, a major source of income would be cut off and this building would be decontaminated.  He had enough evidence recorded on the combutton to ensure that this building was not only emptied but probably demolished as well, and the ringleaders would be arrested.  It was entirely possible that someone else would start it up somewhere else, but unlikely. 

For one thing, Lay doubted anyone but Suho had the stomach for this.  Then he looked up into the screaming, blood-thirsty crowd of spectators and had to change his mind.  They were perfectly willing to pay money to see this, and to lay bets on who would win, they might be convinced to start it up again.  Lay ruthlessly cut off the thoughts and refused to consider it further.  This  _had_  to be the last. 

With a herculean effort, he shoved his way out from beneath the body and continued crawling.  No one noticed him, too involved with the battle still raging above his head.  There were no gunshots anymore and some of the combatants had taken to beating each other with their fists, some grouping together to overwhelm a person before they turned on each other.  Lay breathed a sigh of relief when he made it through the melee to the other side, and saw the break in the wall that lead to the stairs where Suho was waiting.  He shucked the jersey and crawled behind the wall to sit for a moment and catch his breath.  The viciousness of the people out there and the violence of their deaths were terrifying.  Adrenaline surged through his veins and he found himself shaking as the enormity of what he’d done washed over him. 

He heard the shouts dwindling on the floor and knew the game was coming to a close.  If he was going to do this, he had to move now.  Still dragging the scimitar, Lay made his way up the stairs and into the opulent box-seat where Suho had been less than ten minutes before.  There were plush couches, a minibar, and even a television screen displaying a floor-level view of the arena – but no sign of Suho.

“ _Fuck!”_

Lay’s fist hit the wall.   _Did I really go through all this just to miss him?  God_ damn _it!_

He stepped forward into the little room, scanning the corners just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.  The voice came from behind him, cool and amused.

“Looking for me?”

Lay whirled.  Suho stood behind him, blocking the path back to the stairs.  An eerie smile curved his lips. 

It dropped almost immediately, and Suho took a half-step forward.  “I know you,” he said.  Lay’s eyes widened.  “You were in the park, at that café with –”

Self-preservation kicked in and Lay cut him off by hauling the sword off the ground.  It dragged on his muscles, and he could tell it wouldn’t make an effective weapon for long before he was too tired to lift it, but the sight of the massive, curved blade being leveled at his chest was enough to make Suho raise his hands, palm out, in the universal ‘unarmed’ position.  “You’re under arrest,” Lay said. 

The smile was back.  “Am I?”  With no warning, Suho lashed out with one fist, knocking the sword away by hitting the flat of it.  The weight of the weapon swung Lay off-balance and he was forced to stagger sideways or topple over altogether.  He went to one knee and then Suho was on him, one hand going for the sword while the other closed around Lay’s throat. 

Given a choice between letting the man throttle him and abandoning his weapon, Lay let the scimitar drop to the ground and focused his strength on winning the unexpected battle he found himself engaged in.  He managed to flip the criminal over his head using his legs, and Suho, surprised, released him.  Like a cat, the man rolled to his feet in one smooth motion.  Although he’d been technically trained in hand-to-hand combat, he’d never progressed beyond the basics.  It just wasn’t a necessary skill in his every day job runs, and he’d never thought he’d need them.  Now, with Suho lunging for him yet again, Lay regretted his choice to abandon the training.  He rolled out of the way, dodging the kick Suho aimed at his ribs, and got to his feet with the couch between him and Suho.  This left the path to the stairs free and open for Suho, though he merely gave it a casual glance and returned his attention to Lay. 

“It looks like an impasse,” he said, unruffled by the skirmish.  “I am between you and freedom, and I don’t think you will let me go without a fight.”

Lay’s hands curled into fists at his sides.  “You have the right to remain silent,” he said.  “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

The smile widened.  “I like you.”

Ignoring the non-sequitur, Lay continued.  “You also have the right to an attorney.  If you cannot afford one, a lawyer will be assigned to you by the court.”

“You’re so funny.  No wonder he keeps going out with you.”  Suho stepped subtly to the right, putting him at an angle from which he could come around the couch without trouble.  Seeing it, Lay stepped to the left, keeping the couch between them. 

 _Where the hell are Chanyeol and Tao?_   They were supposed to be his backup, his muscle on this job.  He was already tired from making his way across the game floor, and the warrant in his pocket was only a piece of paper if he couldn’t overpower Suho long enough to physically place him under arrest. 

On the floor below, police were swarming into the building.  Suho looked over the railing casually, and sighed.  “This isn’t fun anymore,” he said.  They moved in unison – Lay vaulting over the couch and Suho lunging for the incongruous coffee table set before it.  Lay got to him before he reached whatever he’d been going for, and they rolled to the ground.  It became a scuffle then, both rolling and trying to keep the upper hand. 

Suho disengaged, kicking him hard in the stomach.  Wheezing, Lay flung his hand out and encountered the hilt of the sword he’d dropped.  With a supreme effort of will, he swung it out and up despite the awkwardness of his position on the floor.  Unfortunately, it was so heavy that Suho had ample time to get out of the way.  He fumbled for something in the low-slung table, and while Lay was distracted – no more than two seconds – apparently retrieved his original goal.

The click of a hammer being cocked back drew Lay’s attention, and he looked up straight into the barrel of a .357 Magnum.  “Hollow-point rounds,” Suho said, stroking the revolver lovingly.  “Just think of what they’ll do to your brain when I shoot you in your face.”  He peered over the edge again, a quick flicker of his eyes that left Lay no time to do anything.  “Actually, I have a better idea.  Since you seem to have this bizarre idea that you’re going to arrest me, and there are certainly enough pigs down there to do the job for you even if I shoot you here and now, you’re going to come down with me.  You’re going to tell them that I’m under arrest, and you’re taking me away personally.  And then once we’re out of the building, I think I’m going to keep you for a while so I can make a few phone calls.  There are more than a few people who would be very interested to see y- _erk._ ” 

Chanyeol leaned out from behind the suddenly-stiff Suho.  “Hallo,” he said brightly.  Knowing his habits, Lay guessed that there was probably a very large gun pressing into the small of Suho’s back right now.  He scrambled to his feet as Suho slowly bent down and set the revolver on the floor.  Without taking his eyes off either one of them, Lay retrieved the gun and took it out of Suho’s reach.

“I believe Lay was just telling you about how very under arrest you are,” Chanyeol said, still with a cheerful smile on his face. 

The dark sneer Suho was wearing twitched, and gave way to a greasy smile of his own.  “ _Lay?_ ” he said, dragging the word out.  “I thought for sure his name was Yi-”

Lay shoved the gun in Suho’s face.  “Shut the hell up and move,” he snarled.  Chanyeol gave him a curious look, but didn’t press the issue.  Instead, he used his height advantage to make sure Suho went where they wanted him to, which meant across the blood-soaked floor and into the elevator. 

“Took you long enough,” Lay muttered as they were cuffing Suho and ‘assisting’ him into the back seat of a police car. 

“It was a bit of a mess down there in case you didn’t notice,” Chanyeol said.  Once Suho was securely in police custody, Lay sagged against their car and nearly kept going.  He braced his knees instead, and ended up in a half-crouch. 

“I noticed,” he said, as the last of his adrenalin-fueled energy drained away and exhaustion moved in to replace it.  Suho knew his real name. 

It repeated in his mind like the force of the tides being pulled in by the moon.  Suho  _knew his real name._   He’d recognised him from the café Lay had visited with Baekhyun, which meant that Suho was somehow involved with Baekhyun. 

But that didn’t make any sense.

“Luhan,” he said, and the computer came online over the combutton.  It was a blessed relief to hear that irritating voice again. 

“Excellent work, Agent,” Luhan said officially.  “What do you need?”

“A stiff drink and a week off,” Lay muttered.  “But for right now, double-check Baekhyun’s background for me, would you?”

He could  _hear_  the smugness in Luhan’s voice.  “Getting suspicious, are we?”

“Just do it.” 


	8. Your Poison Running Through My Veins [Part One]

**Chapter Eight – Your Poison Running Through My Veins [Part One]**

 

(Quick note: the title is taken from the Alice Cooper song “Poison” and no, it’s not a typo. >3)

Luhan initiated contact with a heavy sigh.  “You must know how disappointing this is to me,” he began.  Lay, who’d been dozing on the couch, jerked awake. 

“What?”

“I reran his background check for you.  He’s absolutely squeaky clean.  Not even so much as a traffic ticket.”

Lay smiled in spite of himself.  “That’s good,” he said.

“Why the sudden interest?” 

Startled by Luhan’s uncharacteristic lack of attention, Lay sat up and eyed the camera.  “You mean you didn’t hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Suho knows my real name,” Lay said, point blank.  A burst of static crackled from every speaker in the room, which was apparently a considerable amount more than Lay had been aware of because the noise was deafening.  He flinched, covering his ears with his hands, but it only served to muffle some of the noise to a bearable level.  When it finally trailed off, Luhan was calm again.

“And how do you know this?”

“Check your recording,” Lay said, in a pithy mood over Luhan’s hysterics.  If he’d been real, the explosion would probably have come in a firestorm of profanity and silently added another tick to the “Reasons I’m Glad Luhan Is Only A Computer” box in his mind.  There was a long silence while Luhan apparently ran back through the recording, and then the AI came back online with a muttered curse.

“And you didn’t think this was important enough to mention?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be listening to this all the time?”

“The operating system is on the fritz,” Luhan said.  “You’ve probably noticed it on your end as a bunch of static.  Sehun’s going to take it apart and try to fix it now that you’re back safely.”

Lay blinked.  “I was beginning to think it was intentional,” he said, and then dawning horror washed over him.  “You mean you were so quiet during that ‘game’ because you  _weren’t even there?_ ”

“Uh,” Luhan said, intelligently. 

“Oh my  _god,”_  Lay continued.  “Please log this for the record: I am beginning to have  _serious doubts_  about this AI Contact plan because what happens to us when the power goes out?  Those of us in the field  _rely_  on you at  _all times,_  to be there to back us up!”  Before he could get himself started, Lay shook his head in abject disbelief and snatched his phone off the cushion beside him, opening up a new text message to Baekhyun.

_Yixing here.  I’m having some kind of day.  Want to go out for a drink?_

He debated on adding ‘celebratory’ before ‘drink’ but decided he didn’t want to try and explain  _what_  he was celebrating, since he could hardly admit that one of the city’s most dangerous criminals was now behind bars because of him.  His phone buzzed in his hand when the return message came in.

_Oh, I’d love to but can’t.  My day is **shit.**   It started bad and has just gotten worse.  I don’t have time.  I don’t think I’m going to have time for at least a week.  Raincheck?_

Lay sighed, disappointed.   _Next week, then, and I’m holding you to it,_ he wrote back. 

 _Thank you.  Now I have a reason to make it past this week.  Looking forward to it,_ Baekhyun replied.  Immediately, a second text followed it before Lay had even finished reading the first.   _Make it something to really look forward to,_  Baekhyun added.   _Wear something sexy for me._

Lay lifted one eyebrow at his phone, as though it would give him the answer. 

“Are you talking to him?” Luhan asked, archly.  Lay jumped, feeling like a guilty teenager caught with dirty magazines. 

“You said he was clean.”

“That was before I knew he was involved with Suho.”

Lay scowled.  “He’s not  _involved,_ ” he said, irritated.  Luhan started to reply, but his voice was drowned out by static.  There were three loud pops that left Lay’s ears ringing, and then a sort of buzzing dial-tone reminiscent of old telephones.  Lay blinked. 

The buzz went silent, and then the microphone clicked.  Sehun’s voice was  _weird_  when heard through the speakers.   “Sorry Lay,” he said.  “Looks like the whole sound-system just crapped out entirely.  Since moving Luhan to a new register would take longer than just fixing it, we’re taking you both offline until repairs can be made.”

“Oh, great,” Lay muttered.

“I can pick you up at that level,” Sehun said, and laughed.  “These things are really sophisticated.  I’m going to take advantage of it and upgrade the software Luhan utilises while he’s down.  Don’t be alarmed if you hear any weird noises coming from the speakers.  I have to keep them running in case you need anything, or something happens –” There was a sudden  _blorp_  noise and a sizzling hiss, and then Sehun yelped.  “Ouch!  Dammit!”  Sehun’s voice was muffled slightly, as though he were speaking around something – Lay imagined the youthful techie sticking his injured finger in his mouth to soothe it, and chuckled to himself – and he said, “Sorry about that.  Anyway, yeah.  I’ll be here if you need anything.”

Deprived of both Baekhyun  _and_  Luhan at the same time, Lay retreated to his room with his phone.  Putting  _Sleeping Beauty_  on for background noise, he reopened the text window with Baekhyun.

 _Just so we’re clear, what constitutes sexy?_  he wrote.   _A maid’s uniform or something more subtle, like just showing up naked?_

His phone rang, Baekhyun’s name displayed across the screen.  Suddenly wondering if he’d taken it too far, he cautiously slid the bar across the screen to answer it.  “Ah, hello?”

Baekhyun was giggling so hard he could barely get the words out.  “I think,” he said.  “I think that was the best thing I’ve heard all day.”  

Relief washed over him and Lay leaned back against his pillows with a smile on his face.  “Glad I could help,” he said.

“Oh,” Baekhyun gasped.  “Oh, you have no idea how helpful that was.”  He snickered.  “Though my assistant is now wearing the coffee I was drinking when I read that, and one of my associates is demanding to know what’s so funny.”

Lay gripped the phone with both hands.  “Oh, god, don’t share that!”

“No worries, dear one.   _That_  is for our eyes only.  Which makes option two entirely out of the question.  Actually, both options are out, not if we’re going to be meeting somewhere public for drinks.”  Lay could hear the frown in his voice.  “Unless you want to meet somewhere a little more private?”  It was muffled and low, as though he’d spoken with his hand covering his mouth.  Then suddenly, “God _dam_ mit, Jong!  That’s the third one you’ve lost this week.  Yixing, I’m sorry.  I’ve got to go before these fools blow the place up.”  He hung up without waiting for another word from Lay.  A few minutes later, while Lay was still staring absently at his phone, another text message came in.

 _I work with morons,_  Baekhyun said.   _What do you say to a private get-together at my place next week?_

Lay tingled.   _I’d say that sounds pretty good._    _Until next week._

_Anon, dear one._

When Lay realised he was grinning like a lovesick teenage girl at the phone, he put it down and redirected his attention to the movie.  The faeries were arguing about whether to make the dress pink or blue, and no matter how many times he watched it, he always got caught up in the suspense.  Quietly rooting for Merriweather to win, Lay tried not to think about how warm the endearment  _dear one_  made him feel.

 

*

 

Four uneventful days passed while Sehun intermittently updated him on the status of the repairs and upgrades.  On the evening of the fourth, Lay complained.

“What are you  _doing_  over there that’s taking so long?”

“This is a highly advanced, technologically complicated piece of equipment.  It’s much more sensitive than the machines you pick up at Best Buy, and its worth more than both of our salaries combined and  _tripled_  to break this.  It’s a delicate operation keeping it cool enough to keep running even while I’ve got all the pieces scattered around and I’m trying to upgrade the operating system at the same time, and wouldn’t you know it, the simplest part is giving me the most trouble…”  There was an almighty crash and Sehun swore violently.  “Anyway, it’s kind of a hassle.  I’m almost done.  One or two more days at most.”

“Fabulous,” Lay muttered. 

On the fifth day, Luhan was back.  Lay hadn’t realised – until that exact moment –  _just_  how much he’d missed his irascible contact. 

“Hey, you made it!” Luhan greeted him.  “I thought Sehun was killing you based on the last couple of days’ recordings.”

“It might have been easier if he had,” Lay muttered, trying to conceal his elation with uncertain success.  Without Luhan’s constant nagging, and even despite Sehun’s erratic commentary, Lay hadn’t realised how  _lonely_  it got without Luhan.  Somehow, the computer filled a void in his life and apartment with only the sound of his voice.  A void that should  _not,_  he reminded himself, under  _any_ circumstances, be filled by an  _inanimate object._   He debated texting Baekhyun, and decided against it – the other man had made it excruciatingly clear that he was busy and unavailable for the week, at  _least_ , and it was no use tormenting them both with text messages. 

Then he considered the pros and cons of going out and finding someone in a bar, as Luhan had once suggested – it wasn’t as though he and Baekhyun were serious; they’d only dated casually a few times.  This came up under the category Too Much Effort, and he moved from the couch to the bed, thumbing the remote to his television to see what was on. 

“You live such an exciting life, Lay,” Luhan said, and sarcasm practically oozed out of his voice.

“They couldn’t give me anything to do with you out of commission,” Lay said.  “Now that I think of it, I should have told Sehun not to bother putting you back together.”

“Ah! I’m hurt,” Luhan whinged.  “Anyway, I’ve been accessing the recordings from the past few days.  You’d have missed me too much if he’d left me like that.” 

Grateful yet again for the lack of cameras in his room, Lay flushed.  He knew Luhan had access to those things. He hadn’t thought the AI would bother looking at them.  Refusing to answer, Lay flipped channels until he finally gave up in a fit of boredom.

“So,” he began, but Luhan spoke almost over top of him.

“Uh-oh.”

A slightly familiar voice took over the intercom.  “Agent Lay, something just came across my desk that I think you might be interested in.  I’d like for you to come down here so I can speak with you about it personally.”

Lay belatedly recognised the voice of the Agency’s director, Ace, and was up off his bed almost immediately.  “I’ll be there as soon as possible,” he said, and rushed through his shower and dressing routine. 

When he finally made it to headquarters, he realised he was looking a little wild and took a few moments to just breathe.  It was still exciting.

 _Something so important that Ace himself called me about it,_  he thought.  In the back of his mind, he was wondering if maybe they’d gotten a lock on Kris. 

Someone wolf-whistled at him.  “Don’t you look good.”

Lay looked up and saw the greasy smile on Kai’s face as the info-tech sidled up to him.  Although he and Sehun were both qualified ‘technicians’ there was a major difference between them, aside from the fact that Lay actually  _liked_  Sehun.  Sehun did all of the mechanical work, upgrading the equipment they bought and occasionally inventing new things.  He also maintained the computers, and ran errands when there were mysteriously no other things for him to be doing.  Kai…

Well, Kai was technically an info-tech which meant it was him sneaking around in gutters and hacking websites and bank accounts to get them the intel that the field agents to run the missions.  From what Lay had seen, he mostly hung around the office and made a nuisance of himself.

“Go away, Kai,” Lay said, rolling his eyes.  Kai ignored him utterly and pressed him up against the wall, looming into his personal space.

“This is entirely inappropriate,” Lay said mildly.  “Get off of me.”

“You know I’d rather get off  _on_  you.  Or in you.”

“Kai,” Lay warned.  Like any cowardly bully, Kai backed off when faced with superior power.  But the look he gave Lay made his skin crawl.  He felt like he wanted to go back and take a shower all over again.  When the infotech was gone again, Luhan made a dirty noise through the speaker. 

“Why do you put up with that?”

“How would you suggest getting rid of him, without having to hide the body?”

Luhan snickered for a moment, but then gave a curious sound.  “Good point,” he said finally.  “I’ll have him reprimanded if you’d like.”

Lay considered the possibility of someone telling Kai to back the hell off or he’d be in trouble with relish, but realised that if it got back that Lay had had his contact tattle on him, it would just make things worse down the road.  “No thank you,” he said.  “He’s never actually done anything.  He just gives me the heeby-jeebies.”

“Suit yourself.”

Sehun jogged up with an armful of folders.  He pawned some of them off on Lay with an unfamiliar expression on his face.  “Lay,” he said, and then stepped forward and freed one hand from the pile to put it on Lay’s arm.  “Look, I’m not technically supposed to know anything about this.  But I overheard them talking and…” He looked Lay dead in the eyes.  “Don’t take that mission.  Someone else can do it.”

He glanced down at Lay’s combutton, then seemed to remember where he was and blanched before hurrying past and going on his way.  Bemused, Lay turned to watch him go. 

“Luhan, what aren’t you telling me about this mission Ace called me for?” he asked.  “I’ve never seen Sehun look like that before.”

Luhan made a coughing noise.  “I can’t tell you yet.  Not here in the hallway, at least.  It’s terribly classified.  Sehun shouldn’t have said anything.”

The first trickle of uncertainty started at the back of Lay’s mind. 

 

*

 

The door to the meeting room was slightly ajar.  Lay heard Ace’s voice and paused just outside without knocking.

“It’s possible that it’s unrelated to anything,” Ace was saying.  “But there’s a slim chance that the slaying is somehow connected to Kris, and we have to explore every avenue.  It does seem to be something Number One might do, so keep that in mind.”

“Yes sir,” said an uncannily familiar voice.  Lay frowned for a moment, trying to place it, and then realised it sounded like the guy who lived in the apartment across from his. 

“You understand that you’re still on probation, Minhyun?”

It  _was_  the guy in the apartment across the hall.  Lay inhaled sharply, but a quiet hiss from Luhan kept a lid on the outburst he was about to make. 

“Yes, sir,” Minhyun repeated. 

“And you, Aron?”

“Of course.”

“Dismissed.”

The door swung open and expelled Lay’s neighbour, a tall, quiet man who kept odd hours.  They’d passed friendly ‘hellos’ in the hall sometimes, but Lay had never suspected that he might be working for the Agency as well.  Apparently, Minhyun was just as surprised to see him, because his mouth dropped open into a comical ‘O’ shape when he saw Lay standing there. 

“I think we’ll talk later,” Lay said, before Minhyun could get a word in.  He was very aware of Ace’s silhouetted image projected onto the back wall, waiting for him to come in for his own briefing.  Minhyun’s eyes lingered on the undisguised combutton resting on his chest for a moment before he nodded and moved on.  Lay had time to see that he was wearing a combutton of his own and wondered how he’d missed that all these years that he and Minhyun had been neighbours. 

“We generally prefer you not to know each other’s names and faces,” Ace began, and Lay paled, suddenly afraid he was going to be reprimanded for eavesdropping.  “Especially seeing as how you’re both headed out on extremely dangerous missions.  Before I begin, I want to inform you that you have the right to turn this down, if you’re not comfortable with it.”

He waited for Lay to acknowledge that before he went on. 

“I don’t want to send you at all, but in the end, someone has to go and you’re the only one I trust enough to pull this one off.”

Lay was struck momentarily speechless by Ace’s confidence in him.  “Thank you, sir,” he said finally.  Nerves were growing on him the more he thought about this mysterious mission that everyone was afraid of but no one would explain. 

“You did excellent work on the Suho case,” Ace said, a total non-sequitur as far as Lay was concerned.  He accepted the compliment as gracefully as he could when his head was still whirling, and waited for the rest.  “We’ve decided that the best way to get close to Kris is to stop trying to go after him directly,” Ace said, and bowed his head.  Lay was pretty sure he knew why: they’d been hunting him for years, after all, and never gotten close.  “Instead – and you may have noticed this,” Ace continued, baffling Lay who hadn’t given it all that much thought, “We’ve been sending you out after his cohorts.”

Things began to fall together then.  There were still the minor criminals to be rounded up, but with Suho out of the picture for the foreseeable future, the only ones remaining were Xiumin, Chen, and Number One.  D.O. was also on their target list, but the assassin had gone to ground so well that Lay hadn’t heard even a whisper from him since the failed raid.  And at any rate, he wasn’t technically on the list of Kris’s cohorts; while there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was on Kris’s payroll, Lay doubted – and Luhan agreed – that D.O. reported to anyone but himself.  The other three were a different matter.  He doubted they’d be sending him after One before the other two were rounded up, and wondered which one he’d rather face: Xiumin, known mostly for money-laundering, or Chen, the ruthless killer who favoured poison and trafficked in drugs during his spare time.

“Your target is Chen,” Ace said.  Lay felt his stomach sink even as his heart leapt up into his throat.  “You’ll be going undercover; other agents have been in and out, laying the groundwork for weeks now.  This operation will take no less than a month,” Ace continued, and then his voice turned wry.  “So I suggest you clear your social calendar.”

Lay flushed to realise that Ace was probably more aware of his life than even he himself was.  “Yes, sir.”

“Another thing,” Ace said, stalling Lay before he could do so much as draw a breath.  “Your combutton must remain with you at all times, but Luhan will not be able to interfere.  You are essentially going behind enemy lines without backup on this.”

He took a deep breath, and considered it.  He’d joined the Agency to do this, he reminded himself.  The danger was no issue.  He’d known going in that things wouldn’t always be peaches and cream.  He always worked  _basically_  alone, but there was always the knowledge that if something went to hell, Luhan would be able to help him out of it.  That was the point of the combutton and contact backup. 

Somehow, knowing that there was nothing Luhan would be able to do in the event of an emergency made it seem even more dangerous. 

“I understand, sir,” he said, and drew himself up straight.  “I accept.”


	9. Your Poison Running Through My Veins [Part Two]

**Chapter Nine – Your Poison Running Through My Veins [Part Two]**

The first thing they did was haul him in for a makeover.  He was youthful enough to pass for a kid, but they wanted to make him look like someone who would be likely to join Chen’s outfit.  A quick haircut left his once neat hair hanging in unevenly jagged lines around his face, and that was before they bleached it.  Once it settled, Lay looked in the mirror and didn’t even recognise himself. 

“Get back over here,” the stylist ordered, stomping her foot.  Resigned, Lay trudged back to the chair. 

“You’re not done?”

“Not even close.”

Chunks of his hair were dyed red over the bleach-blond.  He was fitted with earrings and false piercings in his cartilage.  The grey-coloured contact lenses felt weird as he put them in, but they didn’t actually interfere with his sight.  And the clothes he was given weren’t actually all that different from the things he normally wore; the biggest change is that they were brand new, and nothing looked like anything he already owned. 

Looking at himself in the full length mirror, Lay felt like he was looking at a stranger.  Sehun jogged up behind him, a wide-eyed look on his face.

“ _Lay?_ ”

“Nice to see you, too,” Lay said.  Sehun shrugged.

“At least you know your covers good,” he said, and handed Lay a manila envelope.  “This has your background and paperwork in it.  You have today and most of tomorrow free, but tomorrow afternoon we’ll be getting you set up with Chen’s ring.”  He jumped, startling Lay.  “Which reminds me, there’s an actual ring in there one of the other agents collected.  Apparently in order to get close to Chen, you have to have one of these things.  I don’t  _think_  they’ll ask where you got yours, but you need it either way.”

Lay peered into the envelope, and saw a delicate silver ring at the bottom. 

“More instructions are inside, everything we’ve been able to dig up, but just make sure you wear it on the right hand.”

Lay nodded to show that he understood, and tried not to think too hard about what he was doing.  His phone buzzed in his pocket.  When he pulled it out, he saw a new text message from Baekhyun and sighed.  Sehun quietly let himself out of the room, and Lay sat down, wincing when his brand-new jeans creaked uncomfortably. 

 _Yixing,_  the text said.   _I know I said I’d be done in a couple of days, but it’s starting to look like we’re going to have to postpone a little longer.  Things are taking too long to get set up._

Considering Ace’s advice to clear his social calendar, Lay looked at his phone for a long moment and then texted back.   _That’s alright.  I’ve had a business trip come up suddenly, and I’m going to be out of the country for a couple of weeks. This is what happens when you’re the only competent person in your company._

The reply came back almost instantly.   _Lol.  Competency is an issue for you as well, hm?  Be safe, dear one._

Feeling melancholy, Lay texted,  _You too,_  and put his phone away. 

 

*

 

His first week as a member of Chen’s cartel was relatively uneventful.  He ran errands, and tried to make himself inconspicuous.  With the proscription against outside contact, even from Luhan, Lay was feeling miserable and unhappy and mostly  _lonely._   It was like the couple of days Sehun took Luhan offline to fix him magnified a hundredfold, especially when he realised that Luhan was  _capable_  of talking to him and just wasn’t allowed.  He’d had to leave his phone at the agency, to prevent temptation, and the other people who lived out of the old hotel with Chen weren’t exactly a friendly lot.

Halfway into his second week, Lay was beginning to wonder about the merits of going undercover at all.  Even with other agents there ahead of him to ‘lay the groundwork’ he didn’t think he was ever going to get Chen’s attention.  It was, of course, when he was considering giving up that Chen appeared in his dorm room.

Looking like a gentleman and nothing like the soulless thug Lay knew him to be, Chen was dressed in a designer suit, tailored to his body.  The expression on his face was calm and he exuded class like the expensive cologne Lay could smell from across the room. 

In cultured tones, he said, “Chang Li Shin?  I’d like for you to join me tonight.” 

Ignoring the envious looks from the other underlings who shared the room with him, Lay rose and went with Chen up to the penthouse.  At first, it didn’t make any sense for a man like Chen to live and work out of an abandoned hotel, but that was before he’d actually met the man.  He seemed to have multiple personalities, for one.  Depending on who he was with, Chen ranged from teenaged thug to high class art dealer in the impression he gave.  With the underlings, he seemed to project the class and ennui that set him apart from them the same way a purebred stallion outshone the rambunctious and fractious plough-horses.  But Lay knew that one or the other was an act, because he’d also seen this same man bickering with Xiumin in One’s presence like a little kid.

It was the same mixed up perceptions that threw Lay off with Tao, and this situation was a thousand times more dangerous than anything Tao had ever put him through. 

The elevator ride to the penthouse was silent, but Chen stepped back and held the doors for Lay to exit first when they reached it.  Cautiously, Lay stepped out of the elevator and half-expected to be coshed over the head by a meat-head.  Instead, Chen’s spacious and utterly empty apartment greeted him.  Lay was privately amused to see that it looked a lot like his own apartment with a near-sterile appearance . He would have given just about anything to get a peek into Chen’s bedroom, just to see if it was as trashed as his own.

“This is just an informal meeting,” Chen informed him coolly.  “I’ve been watching you, Li Shin.  You’ve only been here a short time, and yet, you do better work – and faster – than some of the boys who’ve been here many months.  We have a major –”  His cell phone rang, and Chen’s class-act faded for a moment as he snarled a curse at it before answering smoothly.  “Yes?”

Lay stood quietly, wondering what was about to happen – if he was going to be offered a promotion, or be shot dead where he stood.  He still needed an eyeball on the drugs, or better yet, Luhan’s eye through the combutton before he could even think of calling in backup to take Chen out.  It made his skin crawl to know he was standing less than five feet away from a man who’d callously ended several  _hundred_  lives.  His fingers itched with the urge to reach for a gun he wasn’t carrying. 

“Rocky!” Chen’s delighted voice broke through Lay’s homicidal impulses.  He looked up sharply, then tried to pretend like he wasn’t eavesdropping.  “You’ve got the second one now?  What did you do with the first one?”  A brief pause while Chen smiled like a manic Cheshire-cat.  “Very good.  I’ll pass it along to Number One, and ask that Kris hears about it.”  Another pause.  Lay’s ears sharpened.  “You know I don’t have any direct interference with Kris.  I’ve barely even seen him, myself.  Yes, yes.  You’re doing good work,” Chen said, practically purring.  He moved to fetch two glasses from a cabinet, and poured a measure of wine into both, offering one to Lay before gesturing to the low-slung chaise lounge. 

Even though he’d seen the whole pouring process from start to finish, he still waited for Chen to take a sip of his drink before he dared to follow suit – Chen’s reputation for poisoning people, sometimes at random, preceded him.  He hung the phone up and lifted his glass to Lay.

“Good news,” he said.  “One of our back-up plans is going exceedingly well.  You’ve probably heard from scuttlebutt around the place that Kris’s work is being opposed by a nameless government agency.”  Lay choked.

“What?”

Chen waved it off.  “Nothing serious.  They arrested Suho somehow right out from under our noses, but he already knows not to talk.  Kris has a very long reach.”  He looked hunted for a moment, but the expression passed as quickly as it had come.  “Anyway, you must be lucky.  As I was saying, you’ve been doing good work.  I’d like to offer you a more permanent placement with our… organisation… than just paper boy.”

“I,” Lay started, then stumbled over it.  “I, I don’t know what to say,” he blurted finally.  Chen smiled, a dark, creamy look.

“’Thank you’ is generally acceptable.”

“Thank you.”

“Finish your wine.  And keep tomorrow free.  I’ll bring you back to brief you on some of our operations then.  For now, please excuse me, I have a phone call to make.” 

He left Lay sitting on the lounge with his untouched wine as he pulled out the phone again and pressed a single button.

“Put me through to Number One,” he said.  Lay nearly choked again.  When Chen looked at him, he covered it by taking a cautious sip of the wine, and was surprised to find it was probably the best wine he’d ever had.  For someone who usually contented himself with cheap beer, the probably-expensive wine was a riotous party for his tastebuds. 

“That’s a ’58 Giacomo Conterno Barolo Riserva Monfortino,” Chen said, smugness radiating outward from his pores.  “Please, enjoy.”  He turned his attention to the wall while Lay sipped on the wine, apparently on hold.  His face lit up before he started talking.  “One, you’ll never guess who just called me.”

In the back of his mind, Lay was amused at both the switch from classy gentleman to excited little kid and the fact that even the underlings apparently called One ‘Number One.’  It made him burningly curious to know what the man’s real name was, and if anyone actually knew it. 

“It’s Chen, silly.  I got a call from Rocky~” he sing-songed.  “He made the dump and grabbed a second one, said he was going to start working on it tomorrow or the day after to give it time to really sink in.” 

One of the things Lay hated the most was listening to one-sided conversations.  He would have given anything to know what Number One had to say on the subject of Rocky, and his mysterious doings, especially with how long the silence went on from Chen.

“You need to get laid,” Chen said finally.  “I’m sorry your boyfriend’s too busy.  He probably realised what a dick you are and booked it.”  Another long pause.  “Things are going like usual on this side.  I’ve got a very pretty young thing here I was about to promote to lieutenant.”  Chen laughed.  “Yes, the usual.  Don’t be surprised if you come by, just a warning.”

Lay was nearly twitching by the time Chen hung up the phone, itching to take it from him and demand to know what they were talking about.  He finished the wine and didn’t notice any ill effects from it, but decided to bide his time and make sure no bizarre symptoms appeared later.  Chen hung up the phone and returned it to his pocket just as Lay was wondering what to do with the glass, and solved the problem by taking it from him. 

“So, I’ll collect you tomorrow for dinner.  Does that suit?”

“That’s fine,” Lay said, and wanted to jump up and down with excitement.  He kept his expression neutral until Chen walked him to the elevator, and allowed himself a fist-pump when he was alone.  He wanted to tell Luhan that he was already making progress, and at this rate the mission would be over in just a couple of days. 

He woke in the morning feeling bleary-eyed and half-dead, and spent the entire day in a state of nervous anticipation until around three in the afternoon, when Chen finally made another appearance.   

“Ready, Li Shin?”

Lay was really beginning to regret that name.  It was entirely too close to his own – Sehun said it was to make it easier for him to remember to answer to it, but it was still nerve-wracking to hear something that sounded like his real name from Chen’s lips.  He jumped up and followed Chen back up to the penthouse.  A fabulous dinner was set out on the table, and Lay blinked at it, stopping short in surprise.  Chen seated himself at one end, and waved his hand to offer Lay the other seat.  Everything looked normal, and the smells wafting off of the food were heavenly. 

They made light conversation over the meal, with Chen occasionally pointing out some of the things Lay would be doing.  They included rounding up people who owed money, and running paperwork and other important tidbits back and forth between One and Chen’s operation in the hotel.  The spices on the curry were beginning to make Lay’s eyes water by the time he was nearly done with his meal.  Chen looked over at him, and smiled.

“You eat well,” he said, a total non-sequitur.  Lay was suddenly suspicious of the spices, and the attention Chen was paying him.  The murderer patted his lips gently with his napkin before rising and coming around the table.  “You’ll probably begin to notice the effects around now,” he said, and as if the words were a cue, an ungentle burning began in the pit of his stomach. 

“What the hell?” Lay gasped, and threw himself away from the table as though it would undo the damage.  The chair clattered to the ground, making Chen wince. 

“You must know what I specialize in,” he said calmly, righting the chair while Lay continued to back away from him.  “This is just a little test.  If you’re a cop, now’s the time to confess and I’ll give you the antidote.”

 _Antidote._   Lay considered confessing to it just to find out if Chen was as good as his word, because the burn was beginning to spread to his chest and hips.  “I’m not a cop!” he said, realising that if they had any hope of salvaging the mission, it depended on him not blowing his cover.  “What the hell did you give me?”  His vision was beginning to blur.  The burn was becoming a sharp pain in his stomach, and his legs gave out from beneath him as his muscles turned to water.  He hit the ground with a muffled thump, cursing himself for not seeing  _this_  coming. 

“Just a little something I whipped up in the basement,” Chen said, as blasé as if he were discussing the weather.  Lay felt a renewed sense of panic as he realised this wasn’t something he could go to the hospital with, not if it was homemade.  It might be poison, or some kind of drug, or anything.  As Chen advanced, he tried to back away further, but found that his arms wouldn’t support his weight long enough to move.  The criminal bent over him and scooped him up with one arm around his waist, holding him as easily as if he were a little kid, seemingly with no effort expended.  Horribly embarrassed through the crimson fog that descended on him, Lay could only hang there limply while Chen carried him wherever. 

“I’ll only tell you once more,” Chen said.  “If you’re a cop, tell me now and you might live if you are.  If you don’t, and I find out later, this will only be a small portion of the hell you will feel.”

Lay could barely make out the sound of his voice through the pounding of blood through his ears, but he understood enough to know he was being questioned again.  “I swear,” he gasped out.  “I’m not!  I’m not a cop!”

Chen dropped him unceremoniously onto a bed.  Lay curled into a ball, and then realised that made everything hurt worse before straightening out.  Chen calmly removed his jacket and took it away before coming back and pulling off his shoes.  “Then I hope you understand when I say this is a test.  Not everyone makes it,” he said mournfully.  “But good luck.”  He patted Lay’s thigh and left the room, leaving Lay writhing on the bed in unendurable agony.  He lost track of time almost immediately, but he didn’t think it was too long before he started screaming.

 

The world had burned away to two things.  The blinding, burning, agonising pain he was in, and the knowledge that this was going to end with his death.  He’d either been made as an agent, or maybe Chen just had a quota to fill of people he’d poisoned, but this was the end.  In one of his lucid moments when the pain seemed to dim, he found his jacket hanging across the room on a coat-stand.  In some bizarre twist of fate, the combutton was clearly visible, which meant that Luhan and anyone else watching the recordings would be able to see him. 

He had only a moment to be embarrassed by that fact.  “Luhan,” he called.  His voice broke halfway through the word, his throat sore and rasping from the abuse it had taken.  He swallowed and tried again.  “Luhan!”

Then, like water to a man in a desert, Luhan’s voice emanated quietly from the combutton.  “You know I’m not supposed to contact you, Lay,” he whispered. 

“I know, I know,” Lay said.  The cramps were beginning again, his stomach contracting painfully.  He was grateful for the fact that he hadn’t been sick, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.  His stomach simply refused to expel whatever was in it, leaving him to suffer.  “I have to … log this officially,” he added.  “I think… I think I’m dying.  I wanted to say… don’t send anyone else in after him.”

“You’re not going to die!” Luhan said fiercely.  “Don’t even think that!”

The cycle was beginning all over again, a quiet burn in the pit of his stomach spreading until it felt like his blood had been replaced with gasoline, and someone had thrown a lit match into his veins.  He lost the thread again, but he’d said what he needed to say and wasn’t worried about it. 

At some point during the night, he heard voices from the other room.  Recognising Chen’s, he didn’t call to make sure Luhan was still with him, but the fear that he’d been abandoned to die alone was still in the back of his mind. 

“I think he’ll do just fine,” Chen was saying.  “He’s really quite pretty; you can’t have him!”

A light from the door blinded him when it opened.  Two or three people gathered around the bed to stare at him.  Lay couldn’t focus on any of them and wished he was still wearing his combutton. 

“See, One?  I wasn’t lying.”

Even in the depths of maddening pain, Lay recognised the name of Kris’s right-hand man.  Convinced he was about to die right then and there, the only thing in his mind was a bizarre,  _But Luhan doesn’t know!_

And he realised in that moment that he’d somehow fallen in love with his contact.  A  _computer program._   Wondering if maybe they wouldn’t be doing him a favour to shoot him in the head like a lame horse, Lay turned away from them and waited for the click of the hammer.

“I hate his hair,” One drawled.  “You sure he’s going to be useful?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Chen reassured him.  “He’s done a lot of good work so far.”

Xiumin piped up with, “Then why’d you poison him?  Is it something you can’t control?  Because you really need to get that looked at.”

“Fuck you,” Chen snapped. 

Lay shivered, aware that he was totally helpless beneath three of the most dangerous men ever born.  A thought hovered just out of reach; he knew it was something to do with One, but his revelation and the pain from whatever Chen fed him kept him from getting a handle on exactly what it was.  He’d never even imagined that someone could be in this much pain and live through it.  If they cut his legs off right there, he doubted he’d even feel it until after they were gone.

“Even though we have Jongie doing our spy-work for us, there  _are_  those rumours that he’s gone native.  Has he told you the name yet?”

One sighed.  “No.  Kris says he knows what it is, but he won’t tell me.”

Lay pulled his eyes open with effort and looked up.  His impression of all three men was of carefully tailored suits and ice-cold expressions.  There was no life in One’s eyes – it was like looking into the eyes of a lizard.  Curly hair fell in waves over his forehead and his eyes looked black.  Something about the shape of his face suggested familiarity, but Lay knew he’d never seen anyone except One look like that. 

“Oh,” One said, and leaned close.  Lay tried to withdraw, but his muscles locked up.  “You’re awake.  Good morning, Chang Li Shin.  Welcome to Hell.”

“Don’t scare him,” Xiumin admonished.  “Li Shinah, I think we need to apologise for Chen’s behaviour.  He can’t help himself.”

“Man, fuck you,” Chen muttered again.  “I’ve been telling you, if we can have a spy on their side, they can plant a spy in ours.  I needed to make sure he wasn’t a cop.”

“And are you satisfied?” One asked coolly.

“He checks out,” Chen said, shrugging.  The three men exited the room, leaving Lay with a considerable amount to chew on.  Jongie, whoever that was, was working for Kris.  Finding out which department – fire, rescue, police, or federal – he’d applied to was going to be hellacious.  They were also suspicious of spies in their own corner, but even though they had every right to be – the fact that Lay was lying there was living proof that they were on the right track – they’d somehow missed the fact that he wasn’t who he said he was. 

He was also grateful that his disguise had held up.  He wouldn’t have believed that a small change to his hair and eyes would make a big difference, but he’d been within spitting distance of all three of these men before, and none of the recognised him.  Lay felt the aftershock of adrenaline that came from being so close to a man like One and coming out of the encounter alive, and it set off a fresh wave of pain.  In the back of his mind, hoping it wasn’t just wishful thinking, he thought maybe it wasn’t as bad as it had been before.


	10. Spies On Both Sides

**Chapter Ten – Spies On Both Sides**

He didn’t know when the hallucinations started.  He closed his eyes to rest, and when he opened them again there was an angel in the room.  A fully formed, painfully beautiful stern-faced angel complete with long white wings.  It wavered and melted away to become a flock of white birds that wheeled and dove over his head.  Chen came in while the birds were still flying, and that’s when Lay knew he was seeing things that weren’t actually there because there was no way anyone could have come into a room full of birds and not made some mention.

This theory was confirmed when one of the birds dove right through Chen’s chest and the man didn’t even bat an eye.  The birds changed and became colours that swooped around, landing on things like the dresser and the closet and turning them into letters. 

“How are you feeling?” Chen asked, solicitously.  Lay couldn’t remember the words and didn’t know how he was supposed to answer that anyway.  Chen didn’t wait for an answer.  “I hope you won’t hold all that against me,” he said, and maneuvered Lay into a sitting position before offering him a glass of something.  “Drink this, it’ll help.  You’re over the worst of it now.”

The part of his brain still concerned with self-preservation was wary about accepting any other food or drink from Chen, but his body overruled it with the need for some kind of sustenance.  Too weak to even hold the cup, Lay submitted to Chen’s assistance meekly and when the first drops hit his lips, he realised that it was the single best thing he’d ever tasted.

“Easy now, easy,” Chen said.  “It’s only milk.  It’ll help calm your stomach.”  He was so solicitous, now that he was assured of Lay’s allegiance, it was almost bizarre.  When the milk was gone, Chen helped him lay back down, took the glass, and vanished.  Lay watched the doorknob so intensely that he almost didn’t notice the pink ostrich that came dancing out of the wood grain a moment later.  The dresser, which had become the letter M and still not changed back, began to sing an aria.  The milk did exactly what he’d been promised, and the acidic pain in his stomach and throat and chest began to ebb. 

Lay relaxed against the pillow, rejoicing in his first relatively pain-free moments in what seemed like a hundred years.  As he stared at the ceiling, a hand melted out of it and began reaching for him.  Another hand followed the first, and then another until the ceiling was a mass of writhing arms and hands, all reaching and clawing and grasping.  An eye opened on the far wall and blinked at him.  Lay stared in rapturous terror until another arm came gliding out of the wall beside his head.  With his throat too raw to scream, he simply rolled and threw himself out of the bed and away from the seeking fingers.  The sudden movement made him dizzy, and the muscles in his legs and back protested the motion with violent screams of their own.  Lay curled into a ball to escape the hands when the whispers started.

He couldn’t block them out.  A multitude of voices all saying the same things, negative things; he was a horrible agent, he was going to die, he was a freak for loving something that didn’t exist… He thought he was going to lose his mind before they went away.

Then, slowly, everything started to fade.

 

*

 

Lay awoke in the bed, feeling like he’d been hit by a truck.  His throat was sore, and his entire body ached.  His head was clear for the first time since the disastrous meal he’d shared with Chen, however.  The arms were gone, the dresser was its proper shape.

With the poisonous drugs finally flushed from his system, Lay was capable of taking stock of himself and realising that none of it had been real. 

“Lay?”

His head whipped around at the quiet voice, wondering if he was going to hear voices for the rest of his life.  Belatedly, he realised that it was Luhan, through his combutton.  His jacket was still where he’d last seen it, hanging in the corner.  Lay covered his eyes with his hand and tried to calm his racing pulse.  His voice, when he found it, was a raspy whisper, but it was coherent at least.

“What’s up?”

“Thank god,” Luhan muttered.  “How are you feeling now?”

Lay considered the question, and then smacked his lips, trying to rid his mouth of the fuzzy taste.  “Disgusting,” he offered.  “What day is it?”

Luhan was silent for a moment, and then answered, “Thursday, the nineteenth.  You’ve been out of it for a couple of days.”  

“The last thing I remember are hands,” Lay said.  “How did I end up on the bed?”

“Chen’s been in and out.  He put you back in the bed, and gave you soup or something.  I never realised how helpless I am.  It’s one thing to look at files for the mission and know there’s nothing I can do and watch…. _that_ … and not be able to even help you.”  Luhan’s voice was fierce again.  It only brought to mind Lay’s uncomfortable revelation, and he found he couldn’t even look at his jacket, much less the combutton itself.

“Well,” he said, “I’m feeling better.  And now Chen trusts that I’m not a cop,” he added.  “So it was worth it for that.”  Presenting a blasé front he didn’t quite feel, Lay threw the coverlet off and swung his feet over the edge of the bed.  He half expected to look down and see more hands reaching out from under the mattress for him, but there was nothing. 

The door opened then, and Chen came in carrying a tray.  “You’re awake!” he said, delighted.  “I was beginning to wonder.” 

Wondering what one said to a man who had cold-heartedly poisoned him, Lay opted to remain silent instead of perjuring himself. 

“I’ll give you a couple of days off, to recover,” Chen went on, unbothered by his silence.  “But then I’m going to need you out in the field, running things for me.”

“Okay,” Lay said cautiously.  Chen left the tray on a small table at the foot of the bed, and let himself back out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him.  “What do you make of that?” Lay asked.

“All we need is definitive proof that they’re trafficking in illegal drugs,” Luhan said.  “Figure it out, point the camera on whatever they’ve got, and we’ll send someone in after them.”

 

It was more easily said than done.  For one thing, the ‘things’ Chen had him running back and forth across the city were in locked briefcases, and they were never alone.  Lay took to wearing a Kevlar vest under his clothes at all times, just in case.  It wouldn’t protect him from Chen if the man decided to poison him again, but it was fairly good protection against fists or guns.  There were always other people around, sometimes Xiumin, sometimes D.O., and usually what Lay still referred to as Meat-Heads, thugs with more tattoos than skin and more muscles than brains.  Feeling dirty, Lay used Luhan’s help to evade the police once which only moved him up in Chen’s estimation.    Twenty nine days after the start of the job, just under the month Ace warned it would take on the short-side, Lay found himself with a prime opportunity to get the evidence they needed.  He was alone on the run, and the goods were in a brown paper bag.  Hoping he wasn’t going to find sexy magazines or something equally disgusting, Lay pulled over halfway through the run to look inside. 

At least thirty grand worth of cocaine lay snuggled in neat little packages.  A low whistle came through the combutton as Lay focused it on the goods.

“That is very  _definitely_  illegal,” he said.  “And while I have you here, I need to let you know that your timing is impeccable.”

Lay’s eyes narrowed.  “Why?”

“We’ve gotten enough on Xiumin to haul him in, and someone was able to locate D.O.’s hide-out by triangulating the coordinates from where you were and how – anyway,” he cut himself off, apparently sensing Lay’s eyes beginning to glaze over.  “We sent other agents out after them, and someone tipped them off.  Someone’s infiltrated the Agency.”

Lay had a ten-second flashback to the conversation he’d overheard between Chen, Xiumin and One in the throes of the poison.  “The mysterious ‘Jongie,’” he suggested.

“That’s what we think.  Everyone’s being called in for interviews.”

Lay calculated how long he’d be missed, and whether he’d left anything in Chen’s hotel that would be necessary.  Since all of the things he’d brought in had been specifically for the mission, he felt nothing about abandoning it, turning the car around, and heading back to Agency headquarters.  He surrendered the bag and car into police custody, and found HQ a tumultuous mess.


	11. The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

[Note: Sorry for the interruption, but I wanted to point out the new 'poster' which is an image many people have been waiting for. I'm also sorry for the irreverent picture on top of this chapter.  Have moved the poster to the previous chapter so I could replace it with a relevant picture. Am also retroactively putting banners up. We now return you to your regularly scheduled update.]

 

**Chapter Eleven - The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny**

 

With no one at the front desk, Lay let himself in and found people scurrying back and forth through the halls.  Sehun squeaked when he saw him, and ducked into a room.  Bewildered, Lay found an empty meeting room.

“Luhan, what’s going on?”

“It’s like I said,” Luhan came back.  “Everyone’s under suspicion of being their ‘Jongie.’  Ace is looking for you; he saw you come in and wants to conduct your interview personally.  Fifth floor.”

Lay left the room and headed for the elevator.  He’d never stopped to wonder what was on the other floors before, though he was vaguely aware that the Agency owned the entire building.  People were still running back and forth like headless chickens, with one notable oasis of calm – Kai was leaning up against one wall, flipping idly through his paperwork. 

He seemed to sense Lay before the agent got close to him, and offered a filthy leer.  Lay shuddered before he could control the reaction. 

“What do you want?”

“Heard you got called for an interview with Ace next,” he said.  “Good luck.” He pushed off from the wall and jostled Lay’s shoulder on the way past.  Lay turned to watch him go, revulsion rising up like a bad taste at the back of his mouth, and saw him pull his phone from his pocket and dial out before he turned the corner and was out of sight.  Putting the encounter out of his mind, Lay continued on his way to the elevator and took it up to the fifth floor.  Ace’s office was practically the whole room, with only a small area delineated from the rest for a secretary.  The woman looked up and smiled at him.

“He’s expecting you, agent Lay,” she said pleasantly, and pressed a button on the desk before waving him through the door behind her. 

Lay found himself in Ace’s actual, physical presence for the first time since he’d first gone on the Agency’s payroll.  Uncertain of what to do, he bowed and hovered awkwardly by the door.  Ace sat in shadow, but the moment he spoke Lay recognised his voice.

“Please come in and have a seat,” he said, his baritone voice calm and inviting.  Lay stepped further into the large room and sat in one of the chairs opposite the massive desk Ace sat behind.  Paperwork littered the worktop, and a computer screensaver flashed pictures of popular stars. 

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Lay said.  “I’ve only just come back from –”

“Chen,” Ace interrupted him.  “I remember.  I regret the unfortunate circumstances surrounding that mission, but you conducted yourself well.” He leaned forward, conspiratorially.  “You will officially be awarded a commendation for that, and the police are moving in on Chen’s circles as we speak.”  Leaning back, Ace folded his arms over his chest.  “Officially, I must investigate every single employee of my Agency in an attempt to root out the spy.  It was a suspicion of mine for a long time that someone was interfering from the inside – simple things were going wrong that should not have been.  For example, your mission regarding the files in the company – our information assured us the alarm systems would be disabled and yet they were activated halfway through your mission and you had to be airlifted away from the building.”

Lay flushed to remember that particular clusterfuck, but didn’t have anything to offer.

“And the sabotage of the computers – yes, it was sabotage,” Ace revealed when Lay inhaled sharply.  “Not to mention sensitive information has been flowing out for some time.  As I was saying, I must officially investigate everyone, but I’d also like to point out that you have been above reproach in your entire career, and you are not on my own personal list of suspects.  I would suspect Sehun of passing information before you.  But the formalities must be maintained,” he added, and whatever he was about to say next was cut off when the lights went dim in the entire room and a red light began flashing.  Ace rose from his seat, pressing a button on his desk.  “We have been invaded,” he said, so calmly that it took Lay a moment to process the words. 

“ _What?_ ”

His voice was nearly drowned out by the announcement.  “Attention all Agency Personnel, attention all Agency personnel: level four operating conditions underway.  Repeat, level four operating conditions underway.”

Level four meant enemies were inside the building.  A section of one wall turned around, revealing a veritable arsenal of weapons.

“Please indulge yourself,” Ace said, taking two high-powered handguns and a rifle from the wall.  “And above all, remain safe.”  He disappeared through a door that had been disguised as another wall, pulling it shut behind him.  Lay took that to mean  _grab whatever you want,_  and scanned the wall quickly before finding two more hand guns, one helpfully holstered.  He checked the clips, found both magazines full, and chambered a round in one before slinging the holster around his waist.  It was impossible not to feel like an Old-American West gunslinger, and he bolted for the door thinking things like,  _Gunslinger,_   _this town ain’t big enough for the two of us,_  and  _Make my day,_  and the like. 

Not waiting for the elevator, he threw himself right for the emergency stairs.  Gunfire on a different floor gave his feet wings and he hardly felt the ground as he flew down each flight.  Two Meat-Heads – they might have been Chen’s men, he couldn’t tell them apart – were surprised when he accidentally crashed into them, going too fast to stop when they suddenly burst through one of the doors.  He knocked one of them to the ground, and shot the other one non-fatally in the thigh.  Leaving them groaning and half-conscious, Lay entered the door they’d come through and found himself on the second floor. 

It looked like a dormitory.  The first room he peered into was empty, and contained a bed, a television, and a computer, with other assorted furniture.  Two wallscrolls containing pictures of animated girls with large eyes dominated one wall.  The room directly across from it was empty and untouched, with no traces of personal belongings.  He continued down the hallway and found more of the same.  The majority of the rooms were completely empty, without even sheets to cover the bare mattresses.  Some held traces of the people who must use them on a regular basis, like shelves full of pewter figurines, and another with top-of-the-line game consoles and an entire bookcase full of games. Lay was utterly mystified; he’d had no idea that this was here, and wondered what it was for.  It was evidently in use; one of the computers was up and running, and the screensaver hadn’t even kicked on yet.  Obviously whoever lived in these rooms had just vacated, probably when the coded alarm went off. 

Three more Meat-Heads surprised Lay when he turned the corner, but they were just as shocked to see him and neither side reacted for a moment.  The bullets came flying from behind the Meat-Heads, and once they’d fallen, he saw Chanyeol running up from behind, slamming another clip home and wearing a manic grin that threatened to split his face into two.

“Isn’t this great?” he asked, genuinely excited.  “Any sign down that hallway?”

“Great?” Lay echoed, but didn’t wait for an answer.  “This hall’s clear,” he said, trying not to think of what Chanyeol being loose in the Agency would mean for their clean-up costs.  Already, blood from the three Meat-Heads he’d downed was soaking into the carpets. 

“So’s the one behind me,” Chanyeol said, confidently.  “Tao’s downstairs, so third floor next?  The elevators are down, someone pulled the fire alarm.”

The glint in his eyes told Lay that ‘someone’ was probably tall, wearing a trench-coat, and standing in front of him at that moment.   It felt safer to have Chanyeol by his side than running free spraying bullets without check, and then Lay remembered that there was a spy somewhere in their midst.  The problem was, it could have been  _anyone._

With heightened awareness of his newfound partner, and the memory of the time Chanyeol almost shot him forefront in his mind, Lay followed the other man back to the stairs, unwilling to let him out of his sight.  They reached the third floor without incident, and opened the door to chaos.  Several bodies littered the floor already, and Lay recognised a combutton on one of them.  Another supposed employee – Lay had never realised how many  _people_  there were in the Agency! – was kneeling over him, staunching the bloodflow with a bunched-up tee shirt.  He looked up and saw Lay and Chanyeol staring, and waved them on.

“He’s fine, I’ve got him.  D.O. and Xiumin sighted at the other end of – this hallway,” he said, stumbling over the name, then turned his attention back to the wounded man.  “Hold on, Taemin.”

  Lay wondered, for the first time, what the third floor contained if the first was the front, meeting rooms, and medical bay and the second was a dorm.  The fifth was Ace’s office.  That left three and four as total mysteries.  Chanyeol was already in motion, gliding through the motions of aiming, firing, checking his aim after the gun kicked in his hand and firing.  It was almost like a dance, and at the other end of the hallway, the Meat-Heads fell.  Lay ducked through an open door, and found two Agency personnel involved in a hand-to-hand fistfight with Chen and a Meat-Head. 

Chen saw the motion of the door and turned, ducking, as Lay shot.  The thug fell; Chen rose, found himself outnumbered, and raised his hands in graceful surrender.  Then he blinked and did a double take to get a better look at Lay.

“Li Shin?”

“Agent Lay!  Thank god you’re here,” one of them said.  Lay took a closer look at her, and recognised the girl who did his wash. 

Chen looked curious.  “You were a spy,” he said, voice curiously flat.  Then he began laughing.  “You were the spy!” 

The other Agency worker with his maid withdrew handcuffs, and secured Chen, eventually chaining him to the exposed heater that was the only thing bolted to the floor and guaranteed to keep him from getting away again.  Chen continued to laugh, his head thrown back as tears coursed down his face and he shook with the force of his mirth, seemingly unaware that he’d even been captured.

“There are others still out there,” the maid said, dusting her hands off.  “By the way, my name is Raina.” 

“It’s nice to meet you,” Lay said faintly.  Chen had stopped laughing and discovered himself immobilized, and wasn’t looking too happy about it.  Lay offered Raina one of his guns, and counted up how many bullets he still had. 

At least ten, he decided, and followed the sound of shouting to another large room.  This one looked like a super dorm room, with not only a bed but a couch and a small kitchenette.  Screens, at least a solid dozen of them, took over one entire wall.  It looked like a surveillance headquarters.  More people here had been reduced to hand-to-hand combat.  Lay couldn’t immediately tell who was who, before he saw Minhyun stumble and be caught by a shorter man with multiple earrings. 

Lay threw himself into the fray as soon as he identified his targets, again aiming for nonfatal parts. 

Minhyun glanced up and recognised him before his eyes shifted.  “Lay,” he said, “Behind –”

He never finished the warning, but he didn’t have to.  Lay felt someone at his back, and whirled around, bringing his gun up only to come face to face with the barrel of another gun and –

Baekhyun. 

Lay’s breath caught in his throat.  To his credit, Baekhyun looked just as surprised to see Lay there as Lay was to see him.  Then Lay realised something was off.  One of Baekhyun’s eyes was black, and his hair was beginning to curl. 

“You’re… Number One,” he said, hardly daring to believe it.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Minhyun being dragged from the room by his companion.  He couldn’t take his attention from Baekhyun, however. 

“And you appear to be an Agency dog,” Baekhyun said, one corner of his lips curving into the familiar, cold smile.  “Fancy meeting you here.”

Lay brought his free hand up to cradle the butt of the gun, steadying himself.  “Better an Agency dog than a criminal piece of shit,” he snarled. 

“Watch your language,” Baekhyun – One – growled. 

Lay sucked in a deep breath, then slowly and deliberately said, “Fuck.   _You.”_

Baekhyun emptied three rounds right into Lay’s chest.  The force of the impact sent him spinning before he fell heavily to the ground, curling slightly around the pain.  He turned his head, gasping as the movement sent a fresh shockwave of pain through his chest, and watched as One stepped closer to him and took aim, right at his head. 

Time slowed.  He felt like he could see each individual muscle in Baekhyun’s arm and finger as he took an eternity to squeeze the trigger one last time. 

Lay looked past the barrel of the gun, right into One’s mismatched eyes.  For a moment, the mask of crazy slipped.

“I am sorry about this,” Baekhyun said.  The trigger collapsed.  The gun clicked.  One blinked, and squeezed the trigger again.  It clicked once more, the clip empty.  “Huh,” he said, and then jerked his gaze off Lay just in time to see someone burst through the door.  A third gun roared thunderously, and Baekhyun stumbled.  His hands came away from his side dripping red blood, and then he turned and bolted through an open side door. 

“Get him!” Chanyeol bellowed.  Lay could hardly believe he’d survived, but his chest was throbbing in time with his heartbeat and he remembered that he’d been shot, too.  In an almost-hilarious repeat of the first time he’d been shot on the job, Tao jumped over him and streaked after the fleeing Baekhyun.  Chanyeol fell to his knees beside Lay and slowly turned him over.

The pain blanked him out for a moment, whiting out his senses.


	12. Still Alive? And Waiting For You!

**Chapter Twelve – Still Alive?  And Waiting For You!**

 

Lay was only unconscious for a few seconds.  He came to almost immediately with the frantic sound of Chanyeol’s voice in his ears. 

“Jesus H. Christ on the cross, please don’t be dead,” Chanyeol was muttering.  He opened his eyes and groaned.  The worry in the gunman’s voice turned to mystification.  “How in the hell…”

“Just shut up,” Lay muttered, and reached up to feel his chest.  There were three neat holes in his shirt, but no blood.  He dug slightly and felt one of the slugs come off in his hand.  It was flattened with the force of the impact, but the Kevlar vest he’d been wearing had done its job.  Lay’s head fell back in relief. 

“How did you –?” Chanyeol began again, and then literally ripped the tee shirt into two, exposing the vest.  “You crazy son-of-a-bitch,” he muttered.  “You scared the hell out of me!”

“Heh.”  Lay coughed, and then groaned when that set off a fresh spasm of pain.  “Don’t make me laugh,” he gurgled.  “I think my ribs are broken.”   Each breath was agony.  He wanted the vest off, but he was sure its stiff material was helping to keep him from doing more damage to himself. 

“Holy fucking shit-eating cocksuckers, you are one lucky son-of-a-bitch,” Chanyeol burst out. 

In the back of his mind, Lay heard Chen’s voice saying,  _Watch your fucking language,_  and then he laughed and the pain overwhelmed him again. 

 

*

 

“Shot three times, point blank, in the chest,” the voice was saying.  “And then One tried to shoot him in the head but he’d run out of bullets.”

“Then Chanyeol decided to shoot first and ask questions later,” Tao said smoothly, earning a muffled squawk from Chanyeol.

“He was leaning over Lay with a gun to his head!” Chanyeol defended himself.  “What was I supposed to do,  _not_  shoot him?”

“Hush now, Lay’s awake.” 

 _Am I?_  Lay wondered muzzily, and recognised the feeling of morphine being dripped intravenously.  He opened his eyes to several people looming over him, and was reminded of Baekhyun.  His heart clenched in his chest.   _You sure can pick ‘em, boy,_  he told himself.  A computer and a psychotic murderer.  Which was the better choice?

“How are you feeling?” The clinical voice of a doctor was reassuring.

“Drugged,” Lay muttered. 

Chanyeol shot him an alarmed glance, but the doctor waved it away.  “Any pain?”

“No.  Why are you all standing over me?”  They all shifted and avoided one another’s eyes for a long moment.

“Waitin’ for you to wake up,” Chanyeol said when the silence stretched.  “Weren’t sure if you were gonna make it, for a while, not with you coming back from Chen’s and then immediately getting shot by One.”  He scowled.  Tao put a comforting hand on his arm, making soothing noises in the back of his throat.

“It’s not either of our fault he got away,” he said.  Lay swore, and struggled to sit up.

“He got away?”

“Had a fucking chopper waiting for him,” Chanyeol muttered.  “Think it was Kris piloting.  Either way, Kris wasn’t seen inside the building, so it might have been.”

“So what happened?  How’d they get in?”

Chanyeol glanced around him, and then pulled a chair over, kicking one leg over the arm.  “Obviously, they’ve had a rat in place for a while.  It was Kai,” he added, and his fingers closed around the grip of his gun as though he would have liked to shoot something.  Probably Kai.  “That little maggot,” he started, but Tao cut him off before he could build up a full head of steam.

“Kai alerted them to your presence back at HQ, and staged the invasion,” he said.  “D.O. was shot and killed on the premises, but Chen and Xiumin were taken into custody.  Number One, alias Byun Baekhyun was wounded, but escaped.  Kai also, unfortunately, made it out alive.  Numerous unsavoury people, all wanted for various charges were also killed or wounded.” 

“What about on our side?”

Tao and Chanyeol exchanged an uneasy glance.  “Multiple injuries.  Most not serious, but there were a few casualties.”

Lay fiercely regretted that he hardly knew anyone in the Agency personally.  “Sehun?” he asked.  “Ace?  Lizzy?  What about Minhyun?”

“Minhyun was injured.  Sehun and Ace are fine.”  Tao’s expression was haggard, his eyes deep.  “Lizzy didn’t make it.”

Lay felt his throat close up on unshed tears at the thought of the bright girl who ran the front desk and always had a cheerful smile for him whenever he came in. 

“We’ll get them,” Chanyeol vowed, his expression dark and dangerous.  “We’ll wipe every last trace of them off the face of this planet!”

 

*

 

When his ribs had healed enough for him to move around – it turned out they’d been cracked under the force of the shots, not broken, but it was painful enough as far as Lay was concerned – the first place Lay went was down to the coffee shop around the corner from his apartment for a decent drink.  The girl behind the counter waved to him, reminding him painfully of Lizzy. 

“Welcome back!  Haven’t seen you around lately,” she said, already preparing his usual order. 

“I was in a – car accident,” Lay lied.  “It wasn’t serious,” he hastened to add after her expression turned sympathetically horrified.  “But I wasn’t really up to walking down here to get coffee for a while.”

“I’m so sorry.  Are you sure you’re okay?”

Lay winked at her.  “I’m fine,” he said.  She blushed. 

He accepted his coffee, handed over the money, and stepped away from the counter only to trip over a nearby display with an extended shelf and knock into the person ahead of him, sending them both almost crashing into the sugar counter a few feet away.

“Oh my  _god,_ ” Lay blurted.  “I’m so sorry!  Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” the other man said, and turned around.  Lay’s breath caught in his throat.  It was Baekhyun.

Baekhyun’s face turned white at the sight of him.  “You’re alive,” he said, recovering smoothly.  His hair was straight, his eyes were brown – he looked nothing like the cold-hearted killer Lay knew him to be.  He was now aware that straight hair could be accomplished with a flat-iron and a couple of minutes of effort, and the eyes were the result of contact lenses.  He’d seen himself how much a change could be wrought by a different hairstyle and eye colour.  He looked for Number One beneath the façade of Baekhyun, and found it in the way Baekhyun’s lips just barely turned up at the corners before his eyes dipped in his customary examination.

The heated look sent a thrill of warmth through Lay that was familiar from their first disastrous dates.  He hated that the man still had that effect on him, especially after the last time he’d seen him, One had just shot him three times in the chest.  It would have killed him if not for the bullet-proof vest he’d been wearing.  There was a small scar left behind where one of the bullets pierced all the way through the vest and deep enough into his skin to lodge there before stopping.  He’d had it strung on a chain and was wearing it around his neck. 

“So are you,” Lay said, somewhat belatedly as he remembered Chanyeol had shot Baekhyun just before he’d fled. 

“It takes more than that to end me,” Baekhyun said, and stepped out of the way so a customer who had come up behind them could reach the counter to finish his drink.  Lay automatically followed him, trying to reconcile his knowledge that this man – his boyfriend, or  _ex_ -boyfriend at this point – was the infamous Number One. 

Baekhyun stared at him in silence for a long moment.  Then the cold-hearted killer dipped his head in a small bow.  “Anon, agent,” he said coolly, then spun and exited the little shop.  Lay stared after him for a long moment, wishing things could have been different.  He took his coffee back to his apartment and tried not to think of the effect Baekhyun still had on his libido.  To distract himself, he started talking to Luhan.

“So what’s going on down at headquarters?”

“What?  Oh, um.  It’s busy.”

Lay waited for some kind of embellishment, and sighed when his contact left it at that.  “Well, busy with what?” 

“You’re not going to like this,” Luhan said.  “They’ve just discovered another body on the Han River.  Description matches that of a missing person reported about two months ago.  Two other people have also been reported missing from the same area; one of them turned up dead near the river about a month ago.  Police are beginning to suspect a serial killer, and  _we_  suspect Kris’s involved somehow.”

“What?  How do you figure?”

“Remember Chen’s phone call from ‘Rocky’?” Luhan asked.  “You were in the room when he took it. He said,” and a mechanical click preceded a recorded voice Lay recognised as Chen’s.  “ _You’ve got the second one now?  What did you do with the first one? He made the dump and grabbed a second one, said he was going to start working on it tomorrow or the day after to give it time to really sink in. Good news.  One of our back-up plans is going exceedingly well._ ”  The click sounded again and Luhan’s voice returned.  “The timing of that phone call coincides with the disappearance of the second person, one Choi Minki on vacation from Busan.  The first was Kim Chanyong, and now Gong Chansik has vanished.  We’ve got everyone available working around the clock to find the guy who’s taking them, and where they’re being taken  _too,_  but so far no dice.”

A serial killer stalking the streets was a terrifying prospect, especially since they thought Kris was involved somehow.  “But all of his men are locked up or dead.”

“Except One,” Luhan pointed out.  Lay felt a chill rush up his spine at the thought of Baekhyun callously kidnapping people and murdering them.  Then an equally chilling thought came at him.

“What’s the M.O.?”

“No outward signs of trauma,” Luhan said.  “No visible wounds or anything.  Toxicology is still out on Choi’s body, but considering Chen, we suspect poison.”

Lay shook his head.  “It’s not Baekhyun,” he said, with conviction.  He could practically  _hear_ the raised eyebrow in Luhan’s voice.

“Oh?  Still loyal, are we?”

Lay made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat.  “Of course not.  But why would he resort to poisoning someone when shooting them in the face is more efficient?  He’s not exactly the type to kidnap his victims, either,” he added, though he remembered that the man  _had_  been carrying around a chloroform-soaked cloth during their first encounter and had to rethink that theory.

In the back of his mind, he wondered if he  _was_  still holding onto irrational loyalty.  He’d never really known Baekhyun, after all, and gods only knew what One was truly capable of.  In their last encounter, One had shot him point blank but then when they’d run into each other in the coffee shop, he’d merely exchanged a few words and left.  He  _had_  seemed surprised to see Lay standing there, however, which was probably as close to ‘normal human reaction’ as he was able to get.  Still, if Lay had shot someone three times in the chest, he’d be surprised to see them walking around, too.

“I still don’t think poisoning is his style,” Lay muttered.  “That’s more Chen’s move.  And last I checked, Chen was in solitary at a high-security prison.”

“Kim Jongdae,” Luhan agreed.  “He’s complaining about the quality of the accommodations, but as of five seconds ago, was still listed as ‘contained.’”

Another piece fell into place for Lay, too late to do him any good.  He still let his head fall as he realised how much of a fool Baekhyun had played him for.  “He must have been ‘Jong,’” he said.  “Why didn’t anyone catch that?”

“Until he was incarcerated, no one knew his real name,” Luhan defended the Agency.  “Anyway, Rocky is our problem now.  One of our other agents was on it, but he was wounded in the fighting at headquarters.”

“Minhyun,” Lay blurted, remembering the conversation he’d overheard the day he took on the Chen job.  “But he was also on probation,” Lay added, confused. 

“How do you know that?” Luhan sounded genuinely surprised.

“They left the door open,” Lay said, contrite. 

“You seem to find out everything anyway,” Luhan muttered.  “Minhyun is the one I was telling you about before,” he said.  “The one who was in trouble for… concerns with his contact.”

Lay’s head jerked up.  “What kind of concerns?”

“Ah, emotional involvement.”

Feelings swamped Lay.  He wanted more than anything to talk to Minhyun and find out if that meant what it sounded like.  If it did, it meant that he wasn’t the only one who’d ever fallen for a voice issuing from a machine.  He wanted to compare notes, and maybe see how Minhyun was handling it, but the other agent was still laid up in the infirmary.  He’d been hurt worse in the fighting than Lay was. 

“One of our biggest issues now is finding another agent to take over where Minhyun left off.  You’re in no shape to do it, and the others, well, Minhyun was chosen because despite the problems with his contact, he was the best after you, and you’d already been selected to run the Chen mission.  Taemin was hurt, too, and I think he’s going to be pulled from active duty because  _someone_  doesn’t know how to do his job…” Luhan’s voice took on a distant quality, as though he were talking more to himself than Lay. 

“Who’s Taemin?”

“What?   _Dammit._   Forget that,” Luhan said.  “I shouldn’t have said anything.  Anyway, with so many agents down, we don’t have a lot of options.”

Lay considered his ribs, and his overall state of health.  Taemin – the name was familiar to him, and he suddenly remembered a long-haired man covered in blood while someone else frantically tried to keep him from bleeding out on the floor during the fighting – had been injured severely, and Minhyun less so, but still enough to keep him from active duty.  He didn’t know how many other agents there were, but clearly not enough to keep the Agency running in the field for very long if Luhan was worried about them all being down or out at the same time.   “I’ll do it,” he said.

“What?”

“Whatever needs to be done.  I’ll do it,” Lay said again.  “I’m almost healed up, and you know I’m the best person for it.”

“Lay, no,” Luhan said.  “You don’t understand what we’re asking.  I’m not  _even_  asking you to do this.  This was not a mission option for you.”

“But I’m telling you, there’s no one else.  I’ll do it.”

“You can’t keep recklessly throwing yourself into these situations,” Luhan argued.  “An agent is going to have to deliberately get kidnapped and confront the killer, facing the possibility of being horribly murdered before backup arrives to take him down.” 

“ _What?_   You can’t ask a kid like Minhyun to do something like that!”

“He was prepared and knew the risks,” Luhan said.  “Anyway, you’re not taking this mission.  Someone else will do it.”

“Who?”

Luhan was silent.  Lay took his half-hearted victory and went to bed, but not before pulling up pictures of the victims on his computer.  Seeing the faces of the beautiful young men whose lives had been tragically cut short stiffened his resolve.  Whether Luhan wanted him to or not, he was taking this mission.

\---

(Title is a quote from the 1993 movie “Hocus Pocus.” Lol.)


	13. Tie A Knot And Hang On

**Chapter Thirteen – Tie A Knot And Hang On**

 

“You’re not doing it.”

Luhan’s voice first thing in the morning was high on Lay’s list of  _Things I Hate The Most_ , and it startled him out of a sound sleep.  “Wha-?”  Groggily, he shook his head and rubbed the sleepies out of his eyes. 

“The mission,” Luhan said, voice clipped.  “You’re  _not_  doing it.”

“What mission?” Lay stretched and yawned, completely baffled for a long moment.  Then the mini-argument from the night before swam back up into his consciousness.  “Oh.  Yes I am.” He rolled out of bed and gathered clean clothes to dress.  He moved on a sort of autopilot, wishing he had a decent coffee pot in the apartment.  Putting on the combutton was as normal as putting on his underwear, and he was fastening it to his shirt before he’d made a conscious decision to wear it.

“No you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.”

“No, you are  _not,_ ” Luhan said fiercely.  “You’re injured.  You’ve been put into too many life-threatening situations as it is already.  You’re not going out there.”

Lay silently counted to ten, and when that did nothing for his temper, he started counting backwards from one hundred.  “What does Ace say?”  Ace had the final word in any mission, regardless of the personal feelings of those involved. 

Luhan made an unintelligible noise.  “Ace is out right now,” he said. 

“Then I’m taking it.”

“ _No, you’re not!”_  Luhan exploded. 

Lay’s fraying temper snapped.  “You’re not my mother!” he shouted into the hallway, his hands balled into fists at his sides.  “You’re not my father, or my boss, you’re supposed to be my partner!  But  _I’m_  the one in the field and  _I’m_  the one who knows what kind of risks to take and I’m not letting a  _stupid fucking machine_  tell me how to run my life!”  

Luhan yelled right back at him.  “It’s  _my job_  to tell you how to run your life, your professional life because you’ll notice that I never stopped you from seeing Baekhyun even though I  _told_  you there was something wrong with him!”

“I’d still rather be in love with him than you,” Lay bellowed.  “At least he’s  _breathing!”_

Luhan was silent for a long moment.  Lay gasped and threw both hands over his mouth as he realised what he’d let slip out.  “Are you… saying…”

“I,” Lay began, but there was really nothing to add to that.  He hung his head and groaned.  “Fuck.”

“You,” Luhan said, and Lay could picture him as a human being, working himself up into a frothing rage.  “You  _complete_   ** _imbecile,_** ” Luhan shouted.  “I  _told_  you Minhyun was on probation for falling for his contact and now you’re telling me that you – for me –”

He didn’t seem to be able to finish his sentences.  It was utterly bizarre, and the strangeness was beginning to take Lay’s attention away from their original argument. 

“You,” Luhan said.  “You – you –  _you need a psych evaluation!_   There is  _something_  wrong with  _all_  of you!  I half-expected it from Minhyun but you, Lay,  _you_  of all people!  You aren’t mentally capable of performing to the Agency’s standards.  This is complete  _lunacy_!” 

Reeling under the double insult, Lay could only blink, in shock.  Then he exploded into motion, seizing the combutton and ripping it off his shirt so fast it tore the fabric.  “Evaluate  _this!”_  Lay snarled, flipped a camera the bird, and snatched up his shoes and socks before throwing the door open so hard it hit the wall and left a hole.  From the hall, he whirled around. “I’m taking the goddamn mission,” he added.  “ _Now._ ”

Luhan sputtered for a moment.  “Have you lost your mind?” he shrieked.  “You  _took –”_

“I’m not listening to you anymore,” Lay sing-songed, and reached in to grab the door before slamming it closed behind him.  He pulled on his socks and slipped into his shoes while he was still in the hallway.  His body thrumming with rage and hurt – though he tried to deny it, even to himself, it felt like his confrontation with Baekhyun all over again – Lay took the stairs instead of the elevator, jumping down them two or three at a time.   _I can’t believe he said that to me,_  he thought.  It felt like a bullet to the heart, and he heard Luhan’s voice in his memory:  _You need a psych evaluation!_   Luhan thought he was mentally aberrant, incapable of performing his job. 

Lay’s fist hit the wall.   _I can’t help who I fall in love with.  It’s not exactly voluntary!_    _Doesn’t he know that if I could have_ chosen _to fall in love with someone it wouldn’t have been a goddamned machine?_   He burst out the back door, scattering a pair of stray cats who were meandering down the alleyway the door let out into.  His research into the kidnappings the night before had informed him that the young men were taken off the street, as they were walking down deserted roads, even in broad daylight.  Choi had been taken from a nightclub – he’d gone to the bathroom and simply not returned. 

Lay turned left, heading for the industrial section of town.  The wind blowing in from the river was chilly, and it wasn’t until he shivered that Lay realised he’d forgotten his jacket.  He glanced down at himself and remembered that he’d torn off his combutton, too.   _This was a stupid idea,_  he told himself.   _What good is it going to do to_ actually _get yourself killed?_

He was so involved in his thoughts and self-recriminations that he didn’t even hear the vehicle rolling to a stop behind him.  It wasn’t until he’d been snatched off his feet and hauled into the back of the van that he realised where the danger was.  A hand came over his mouth, holding a damp cloth with the unpleasant smell of chloroform on it.  Lay looked up, suddenly terrified, into the oddly familiar, inky black eyes of Byun Baekhyun before the darkness swallowed him.

 

*

 

He came awake on a distressingly soft surface.  Half-expecting to be tied up in the back of the van, Lay stretched and was surprised to find that he could.  His head ached, and his mouth tasted horrible, but he was unrestricted.  That lasted only long enough for him to open his eyes and take in his surroundings. 

It looked like a giant box, with two solid walls and two glass panels.  Lay was stretched out across a neatly-made bed, until he sat up and began walking the length of the room.  The glass was visibly thick, and so dark he could barely see through it – Lay pounded on it with his fist and instead of a sharp rapping, he got a muffled thud.  The room was essentially bare except for a tiny metal plate near the floor, and a toilet and sink in the far corner.  There didn’t appear to be any way in or out, and Lay looked up, wondering if they’d lowered him through a trapdoor in the ceiling.  

The ceiling was interesting in its own way.  A detailed fresco had been painted there, very skillfully, and Lay guessed that someone must have spent a lot of time and money to have it done.  Pipes had been hung, fairly recently it looked like, and tubes ran from the pipes into little nozzles that looked like fire-control sprinklers.  There didn’t seem to be any reason for them. 

Lay pushed on every inch of the walls and glass that he could reach, even the small square of metal near the floor.  He found out that it would open and looked through to see another metal door on the other side of what might have been a conveyor belt.  It was too small for him to crawl through, however.  The bedframe, toilet, and sink were bolted to the ground.  The mattresses were free, but there wasn’t much that could be done with such a large mattress.  Lay tore the covers and sheets off the bed, flipped both mattress and box-spring, but could find nothing that would give him any hints, clues, or weapons.  He put the bed back together and sat down, wondering where he was and what was going to happen.

 

He soon lost track of time.  He had no way of knowing how long it was before a totally unfamiliar voice came over a speaker with a cackling laugh. 

“Welcome, Agent Lay,” the voice said.  “My name’s Rocky.  I’m the last person you’re ever going to speak to.”

“What?” Lay bounced off the bed and prowled the room again.  “Why are you doing this?”

“Oh, reasons.”  Rocky said airily.  “I’ve been wondering how long it was going to take to get an agent like you out here.  Have you found Jaehyunnie yet?”

Lay looked around to see where the voice was coming from, but it seemed to be all over with no discernible source.

“Don’t waste your time looking for a way out,” Rocky said.  “There is none.   This chamber is completely airtight.  If I wanted, I could suffocate you within minutes just by turning off the oxygen flow.  But my way is so much more fun.”

“What about Jaehyunnie?  Who’s that?  And why am I here?”

“My last guest,” Rocky said.  “There were four of them before you.  Kim Chanyongie, Gong Chansikah, Choi Minkiya, and Park Jaehyunnie.  Now I have an agent to add to my collection: Zhang Yixingah,” he intoned.  Lay felt a shiver of dread run up his spine at hearing his name from that voice.  “Baekhyunnie was most helpful.  As to why you’re here…” He giggled, an insane, high-pitched noise that formed an icy lump in the pit of Lay’s stomach.  “You’re here to die, Yixingah,” he said.  “And while the Agency is busy looking for you, they’ll be too busy to look for – anyone else.”

The pieces fell into place. “Kris and Baekhyun,” Lay said, snapping his fingers.  “They’re running, and you’re their diversion.”

“Very good,” Rocky said, his voice childlike.  “You’re so smart – too smart for me.  That’s why I have this button.  I wonder what it will do?”

Something clicked, and then a hissing noise reached Lay’s ears.  He looked around quickly, and noticed one of the spigots was spewing a white cloud of something into the room.  Lay backed up against the far wall to get away from it, but the cloud spread rapidly.  Apart from being cool, Lay didn’t notice anything special about it. 

“A gas chamber,” he said, suddenly realising how the other four had died.  They’d been locked into this room, terrorised by Rocky, and then gassed before he dumped their bodies.  This was the plan the Agency had concocted, for an agent to get himself abducted to lead them back to the perpetrator, but without his combutton, no one could track him.  No one knew where he was.  He was going to die in this torture-chamber –

Alone.

 

*

 

He was just starting to notice that he was hungry when the metal door opened and a tray came through.  Lay was startled; he hadn’t noticed anyone walking up to the glass.  He climbed off the bed and retrieved it, wondering briefly if it was safe to eat.  Then he realised that they wouldn’t have gone through the effort to set up the gas pipes if they were just going to poison his food. 

Deciding that he was going to die anyway, one way or another, Lay settled down to eat.  He didn’t notice any ill effects from the food or the drink, and when he was through, he sent the tray back through the little door and retired to the bed. 

With nothing else to do with his time but think and sleep, Lay thought about the argument with Luhan that had caused his irresponsible behaviour.   _If I had to die anyway,_  he thought once,  _at least I was able to confess my feelings._

Even if they were irrational and imbecilic.  He couldn’t, he reminded himself, have chosen any two people – or things – worse to fall for.  He thought perhaps he might have had something real with Baekhyun for a while – he wasn’t a big people person, but he knew enough to know that Baekhyun had been genuinely attracted to him, at least before he found out they were on opposite sides. 

Thinking of Baekhyun only reminded Lay that the sociopathic killer was assisting Rocky with his kidnapping scheme.  Probably, the entire thing had been set up for them specifically.  Rocky had all but admitted that he was there to turn the Agency’s attention away from Kris and Baekhyun, and Lay could only assume that it was a cover for them to make their getaway.  Then he remembered what Chen had told him about their back-up plan.  Everything was falling into place, it was just too late for him to do anything about it. 

 

The next time a gas came from the spigot, it caused Lay to pass out right where he was standing.  He came around on the floor next to the glass wall, and found a tray of food waiting for him, but the smell coming off it made him feel sick and nauseous.  He swallowed reflexively until the feeling went away, and the cold food was unappetizing in the extreme.  Though he felt hungry, his unsettled stomach didn’t feel like it could handle anything and he simply pushed the tray back through the door untouched. 

He managed to crawl to the bed and flop down on it, but then realised that the other four men who’d been in this room before him had probably died on it.  It gave him the heebie-jeebies to know that he was laying in the spot where someone was killed, but the only other option was the floor, which was hard and cold.  The next meal was unaccompanied by gas, and Lay felt recovered enough to eat, but the thought settled into his mind and wouldn’t leave: when would the killing gas come?

He began to jump every time the hissing started.  Some of the gasses were green, and some were yellow.  He didn’t know what made them different colours, or if the colours had any meaning.  There didn’t seem to be any schedule to them, either.  One of the substances that seemed to drop out of the spigot and race right towards him caused agonising muscle cramps that never seemed to end.  Another gas simply made him tired, and a third ended with him bent over the toilet for hours, spewing up everything that had ever been in his stomach. 

As a man who’d faced down killers with guns and knives, and psychotic people who gloried in bloodshed, and conniving people who stole corporate secrets to earn their living, Lay felt weak in the face of the gas.  Just the sound of the spigot opening was enough to set off bone-deep tremors of fear, and he began to dread the day the poison gas would come and take his life. 

The sound of the spigot opening was enough to jolt him out of sleep; he’d grown to sleeping lightly, waiting for the tell-tale  _clickhiss_  of the gas entering the room.  He waited, holding his breath as long as he could.  When he inhaled, the room spun crazily around him but aside from making him dizzy, it seemed to have no real effect. 

He’d slept seven times since being abducted and dropped in the room without a door, but other than his need for rest, he had no idea how long he’d actually been there, or how long he went without sleeping, or how long he slept when he managed to close his eyes.  The terror grew inside him like a cancer until it was taking up every cell in his body.  Each time he went to sleep, he wondered if the man would let him go quietly.  With every waking, he grew more afraid that today would be the day he’d die.  It seemed irrational, and if it had just been the waiting, he might have been able to handle it. 

But waiting to die while being tortured with unpredictable gasses that spewed at random from the ceiling was beginning to take its toll.  Lay could feel his sanity beginning to creak under the weight of the pressure.  He threw himself under the bed to escape the gas the next time it came, but it found him anyway.  He grew disoriented and began hearing things – a wolf howling in the distance, and the buzz of  a chainsaw.  The bed wiggled, and shrieked. 

Convinced it wanted to kill him, Lay scrambled out from beneath the murderous platform and took refuge beside the toilet, which seemed to be ten feet tall and made of solid gold.  Though he was totally unaware of it, tears slipped out of his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.  He could  _feel_  the cracks taking hold in his brain, prying it apart.  It wouldn’t be long, he realised, when the hallucinogens wore off, before he simply lost his mind completely. 

\--

(title from a quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt.  “When you get to the end of your rope. Tie a knot and hang on.”)


	14. In Which Everyone Gets To Say “I knew it!”

**Chapter Fourteen – In Which Everyone Gets To Say “I knew it!” (and Questions Are Answered)**

 

When the food-door opened to admit a live mouse, Lay was convinced he was hallucinating again.  It squeaked and ran to and fro for a minute, and didn’t stand up and tap dance, or begin declaiming Shakespeare or anything.  Lay was beginning to wonder if it was there at all when Rocky’s voice came over the intercom again.

“This, my darling Yixingah, is just a short, sweet,  _taste_  of what is to come for you.  A nibble, as it were.” 

Before Lay could gather enough of his scattered wits to ask what the hell  _that_  was supposed to mean, the  _clickhiss_  of the spigot opening cut him off.  Lay looked up and saw a virulent, bubble-gum-pink burst of vapour shoot out of one of the pipes.  It cut off again almost immediately, leaving just a tiny, diffuse trace of mist in the air. 

Puzzled, Lay waited to see what would happen.  The smell reached him first – it was something like rotting eggs coated in petrol.  He gagged, but swallowed back on the urge to vomit. 

The mouse was having a worse time of it.  Squeaking and spasming, the mouse convulsed twice before rolling over.  Its spine bent unnatural and its legs twitched before it went utterly still.  The disgusting smell dissipated after a while but the fear lingered. 

 

Lay crouched in the corner that was furthest from everything – the bed, the little door, the spigots, and the bathroom.  He had both hands on his head as though he were trying to keep it from cracking apart with the pressure of his fingers.  His thoughts were scattered and disjointed.  He hadn’t been sleeping, and so had no way of knowing how long it had been.  On the verge of a total nervous breakdown, Lay was at the end of his rope.  One more  _clickhiss_ , he was sure, and his sanity would snap entirely.  Death would be welcome. 

Something clicked, and Lay glanced up, wild-eyed.  No gas came out – that he could see.  A broken howl started to rise up in the back of his throat, but before it could burst out of him, a voice spoke to him.  For a moment, Lay wondered if it was the voice of God, or maybe an angel coming to take him to the afterlife.  Then, oddly, he realised it was familiar. 

“Lay!  Agent Lay!  Respond!  Are you there?”

It sounded like… someone he knew, Lay realised.  The name hovered just outside of his conscious grasp.  It reminded him of his sterile apartment, and feelings that were not fear.  Warmth blossomed in his chest as the name returned.  “Lu- Luhan?”  His voice was cracked and dry.  His throat hurt, and the word hurt coming out, but it was intelligible. 

“Thank  _god._   We’re on our way in.  I hacked his computer, but the controls are on a separate board.  Try to hold on just a little bit longer.”

It was too much, too fast.  Lay couldn’t understand what he meant – none of it made sense.   _Who was coming in?  Hacked what?  Controls?_  But the voice – the dear, beloved voice – had often helped him out of trouble.  He remembered that.  Before the life of gas and fear, that voice had been there for him no matter what.  His sanity crept back just a little bit, tentative at first, but gaining a stronger hold.  Lay felt more like himself for the first time in what must have been a hundred years. 

“Okay,” he said.  The speaker clicked again.  The less familiar, more horrifying voice of Rocky issued from nowhere.

“I see we have been invaded, little Yixingah,” he said, just as bright and cheerful as if he’d been commenting on the weather.  “I didn’t want to do this so soon – it’s so much more satisfying when they scream first.”

A voice broke in over top of his.  “Lay, get down!   _Down,_  out of the way!  Get under the bed!”

It was Luhan.  Lay was scrambling to reach the underside of the bed before he’d finished processing the words, the response to obey Luhan’s orders so ingrained that it was almost instinctive. 

The roar of gunfire drowned out the  _clickhiss._   As Lay pushed himself under the bed frame, the last thing he saw clearly was a cloud of noxious, bright pink gas issuing from the ceiling.  The glass wall began to shudder, and small, bright white stars blossomed all over it. 

Lay covered his mouth with his shirt and his hand, holding his breath as long as he could.  Holes began appearing in the glass wall, and soon the bullets were thudding into the far wall.  The gas moved slowly, but again the smell reached him.  Nausea rippled through his gut, but Lay swallowed against the reflexive urge. 

“Come out, Lay, we’re here for you!”

The gunfire stopped.  In the tiny, rational part of his mind that was left he was afraid.  The gas sank to the floor, still creeping towards him.  Lay found himself frozen with indecision – face the unknown shooter, or the gas?  The gas would reach him eventually.  It was already creeping closer.  Something pounded on the glass, sending tinkling shards of it falling to the floor.  Lay pushed himself further beneath the bed, trying to get away from the gas.  It was beginning to make him dizzy. 

“Shoot it again!” Luhan said.  “It’s not giving!”

More gunfire.  Black spots were dancing in front of Lay’s eyes, and his stomach felt like someone had punched a hole through his gut.  He curled around it, trying to stop the pain. 

Someone crashed through the glass, spraying shards of it in all directions.  The gas immediately began to dissipate, though the nauseous feeling remained.  Then someone was kneeling beside him, someone was  _in the room with him_  and Lay reached out and clasped the offered hand.  With surprising strength, his rescuer hauled him out from under the bed and lifted him to his feet, allowing Lay to lean on him while they half-ran, half-staggered out through the large new hole in the glass, exiting the room entirely.  Lay stumbled to the floor once they were free of it and vomited reflexively.  He sucked in huge gulps of fresh air, and found himself shivering uncontrollably.  He’d come within seconds of an agonising death, he knew.  His brain still hadn’t caught up with his circumstances, and he could hardly believe he’d made it out of there. 

That reminded him of his rescuer, and he looked up into a large pair of soft brown eyes.  Then he took in the entire face, and he realised it was vaguely familiar, though someone he didn’t think he’d ever seen before. 

“Thank you,” he murmured, and tears spilled down the half-familiar face just before they threw themselves at him and held him tightly.  Lay’s arms came around the other man automatically – it was relief and comfort and an affirmation that he was still alive, that he was going to be okay. 

When they drew apart, Lay studied the face.  It was small and round and cute, and recognition hovered just outside of his consciousness.  “Who are you?” he asked. 

The other man looked up at him with wide eyes, then his lips thinned in a self-deprecating smile.  “In trouble,” he said, and the voice was even more hauntingly familiar than the face.  “That’s who I am.”

“I don’t,” Lay said, and paused before finishing.  “I don’t get it.”

The youthful man took both of Lay’s hands in his, and looked at him earnestly.  “I know this is going to be hard for you to handle,” he said, immediately putting Lay on the defensive.  He saw it, and apparently checked whatever he was about to say.  “I’m Luhan.”

“I’m dead,” Lay blurted out.  ‘Supposed-Luhan’ looked askance at him for a moment.  “Because you – you’re not real,” he finished, floundering.  “You’re a – computer… aren’t you?”

“I work with computers,” Luhan said, dipping his head.  “You’re not dead, though.  Not yet.  It wasn’t my idea.  The Agency – Ace, he’s worked for a lot of other government agencies and corporations, and he took all his experience and started his own.  We’re sanctioned by the government – sort of like the annoying cousin you don’t like to admit being related to, but you’ll still pose for family pictures together.”

“What?” 

“Sorry.  But not even the government has perfected the artificial intelligence.  We can give computers commands to respond to certain things, but the best computer ever made is still the human brain.  The only real AIs in the Agency are in the infirmary; they monitor life-signs and alert the nurses or doctors if anything changes.  Everyone else – all the contacts – we’re all people.”

Lay reeled.  This cute little doe-eyed guy was  _Luhan._   The snarky, argumentative voice Lay had been dealing with for the better part of six years belonged not to a computer, as he’d been told by nearly everyone, but a real, living person.  Lay shoved him backwards, knocking him over. 

“ _Oof,_ ” he grunted.  “I guess I deserved that.”  He looked up, suddenly suspicious.  “You’re not going to hit me, are you?  Shoot me?  I know Baekhyun didn’t handle it very well when you two found out about each other…”

Lay shook his head in silence, still trying to fit all the pieces together. 

“As touching as this scene is,” Chanyeol began, striding up to them with a massive gun slung over one shoulder.  “It’s probably a good idea to get out of here soonishly.”

Tao hovered behind him.  There was something  _comforting_  about ChanTao being there while this kid claiming to be Luhan stared up at him with large, dark eyes and a helpless expression that lingered in curiousity, just above misery. 

“What did Rocky say?”

“Told me it was too late, he wasn’t needed anymore, and killed himself,” Tao said, regretfully. 

“Kris,” Lay blurted.  “And Baek-Baekhyun.  They’re getting out.  We have to go after them.”  He started to his feet, and found the room spinning precariously around him.  The Luhan-imposter seized his hand and steadied him. 

“Whoa,” he said.  “You’re not going anywhere.  You nearly  _died,_  do you understand that?  We have to get you back and check you out.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Lay snapped.  It was too much!  How could Luhan be real?  Did this mean he wasn’t in love with a computer?  Just a liar.   _Probably still a step up from sadistic killer,_  his subconscious popped up with. 

“I don’t know how I can prove it,” Luhan said.  “I’m – I know!” He reached into a pack on his belt and withdrew a combutton and a headset.  “Listen,” he said, handing Lay the combutton.  Lay leaned against the wall to keep himself upright, and held it in his hand.  Luhan spoke into the headset, and almost simultaneously, his voice – very slightly distorted, the same way Sehun had sounded so weird – emanated from the combutton. 

But it was familiar.  It was the voice that had shouted him out of bed in the mornings and argued with him over coffee.  Lay felt his head whirling, and was vaguely aware of gravity giving up the ghost just before everything went dark. 

 

*

 

He woke being jostled around in someone’s arms, as they tried to maneuver him into a small space.  Tensing, he took stock of his surroundings, and then recognised Tao giving Chanyeol orders, and the lilting tones of Luhan – Luhan’s  _real_  voice.  He didn’t think it was the surprise that had caused his fainting spell but rather shock and trauma left over from his ordeal, but he hated how it must have appeared.  “I can get in on my own,” he said, and Chanyeol dropped him with a startled yelp.  Luckily he was already in the car, and only fell a few inches.    

Luhan crawled in beside him.  Lay found he couldn’t take his eyes off of him, drinking in every detail from his wide eyes and curly mop of hair to the smallness of his face and the wiry strength in his body.  “So I guess I owe you an apology,” Luhan said.  “For lying to you for so long.”

“Um,” Lay said.

“But like I was saying, it really wasn’t my fault.  The Agency – it was all Ace’s idea!  He thought you as agents would be safer in the field if you had limited contact with the people you worked with.  You know how in movies spies always operate in total secrecy, but we also had to have some way to keep an eye on you and help if necessary.”

“Excuse me,” Lay said. 

“And also, I’d like to tell you I’m sorry for um.  Overreacting.  When you said.”  He flicked a glance at Tao and Chanyeol, who were sitting in the front seat and obviously eavesdropping.  “What you said,” Luhan finished before Lay could get a word in edgewise.  “It’s just that I know how much trouble Aron and Minhyun got into when they had a – um.  Similar problem, and I didn’t want that to happen to you, you know, being threatened with the possibility of being kicked out of the Agency and all.”

“Okay, I believe you’re Luhan,” Lay finally spoke over him.  Luhan lit up from within, a radiant smile crossing his face.

“You do?  How’s that?”

“You still don’t listen to anybody.”

From the front, Chanyeol howled with laughter.


	15. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

 

“I’ve been with the Agency for a long time,” Luhan said.  They were sitting in Lay’s sterile apartment, drinking beers.  Luhan had flatly refused to go anywhere near his bedroom until it was cleaned, but he’d looked around and declared it ‘just the same’ view as from the cameras, which were nearly everywhere, to Lay’s immense surprise.  “I found you just after you graduated college.  Top marks, exceptionally bright, and well-liked by everyone.  That’s the type of person we look for, so I flagged your profile.”

“Creeping much?” Lay asked, drawing a laugh out of his former contact. 

“Just a little.  Then you went into law enforcement, and I knew you’d be wasted there.  I, um, may have pulled some strings to get you advanced and offered the position with the Agency,” Luhan admitted, looking shy.  “And then by that time I really liked you, so I asked for a special favour and was assigned to be your contact when you came in.”

It had been six months since the Rocky incident, and Lay’s enforced medical leave/vacation was coming to an end.  Luhan had been reprimanded for breaking the rules and exposing himself to Lay as well.  Things were quiet from Baekhyun and Kris, though the Agency’s informers had them in Canada.  It was the first time they’d been allowed near each other in months, and Luhan admitted to a burning jealousy where Baekhyun had been concerned.

“I hated having to watch him,” he said.  “Because I liked you so much and  _he_  was the one who was here, who could touch you, and –”

“You’re here now,” Lay said.  Although they hadn’t been allowed to see one another, they had begun exchanging a series of letters and talking as more than just Agent and Contact.  The friendship – which had its roots in their partnership but had always been pruned back by Luhan’s masquerade as a computer – blossomed quickly into something approaching a romance. 

“I am,” Luhan said.  “But actually, I wanted to ask if you if you want to go back out on another job.  You’ll need a new contact of course,” he added.  Lay recoiled.

“Why?”

Luhan’s smirk was catlike.  “Because I’ll be in the field with you if you accept it.”

“But – you –”

“I’m fully qualified to do any job in that Agency, except maybe Sehun’s,” Luhan said, defensively.  “I just don’t know that much about how everything works.  But anything else – especially agenting – I practically invented the Agency, even though Ace is the boss.”

“Luhan, shut up.”

“Shutting,” Luhan said, and Lay kissed him to head off any further arguments.  Luhan smiled like the sun when he pulled away.  

“I would love to have you as my partner in the field,” he said. 

For the first time, Luhan looked nervous.  “I hope we’ll make a good team.”

“We’ll probably fight ten times a day,” Lay said knowingly.  “But it’ll only be so we can make up twenty.”


	16. Coda: Six Months After That

**Coda – Six Months After That**

Stretched out on a sunny beach with a drink that had a little umbrella in it didn’t feel like work.  It certainly wasn’t as labour-intensive as what he’d been doing a year ago, but then again, he could have been doing ten times the work he had been and it wouldn’t have been as labour-intensive only because Luhan was there with him.

As he’d predicted when they started, Luhan was just as argumentative and snarky in person as he was when Lay thought he was a computer. 

Luhan finished his drink with an impolite slurp, then set it off to one side.  “We should get going soon,” he said.  Lay sighed, but the sun was starting to sink below the horizon and it would be getting chilly to just be lying around in swimming trunks.  He finished his drink with more decorum than Luhan, gathered the glasses, and brought them back to the cabana.

“I can’t believe he’s got us working this on our vacation,” he griped.

“It’s a prime opportunity.  One of the foreign agents was supposed to have left a message for us and there’s no other way to retrieve it.  It’ll be easy,” Luhan said.  “In and out.”

“I hate it when you say that,” Lay muttered.  “It always turns out to be a lie.”

 

*

 

Racing hand in hand down the corridor, Lay and Luhan made their escape from the towering hotel.  Bombs on the upper level would soon send the entire structure crashing to the ground, whether they were free of it or not. 

“It’ll be  _easy,_  you said!” Lay shouted.  A shockwave rocked the building to the foundation and made them stumble.  “In and out, you said!”

“Yeah, yeah, I was wrong!” Luhan yelled back, straining to be heard over the sound of the explosions.  “At least we got it!”

Lay was clutching the manila envelope containing the alleged letter from another agency in his free hand.  Luhan tripped across an overturned chair that had been jostled into the hall by the quaking.  Lay hauled him up and they kept going.

Once they’d reached safety, Luhan turned to survey the damage wrought in the burning building.  The top half was almost entirely missing, having collapsed into its own lower floors.  Flames burst out of a window and reached up, tongues of fire licking the upper stories.

Lay used the light of the fire to read the envelope.  It was mostly unmarked on the outside; a simple type-written note declared it was addressed to “The Agency, c/o South Korea.”

He tore it open and shook out a second, smaller envelope.  This one was clear, and Lay handed the open envelope to Luhan to free up his hands.  He opened the second envelope, and discovered a single polaroid picture.  Frowning, Lay held it up to use the light to see it. Then he gasped.

“What is it?”  Luhan crowded close to get a better look at it, and then snatched it out of Lay’s hands so he could stare.  “Is this… what I think it is?”

The picture was of the two of them, lounging on the beach with their multi-coloured drinks.  It appeared to have been taken earlier that day. 

On the back, in silver ink, was scrawled the words, “ _I still see you.  –One”_

 

__


End file.
